10 Ways Google Can Spot Paid Links

Posted on October 8, 2007 
Filed Under Worthless Text Links, Google

With all of their spidering and datacenter power, it should be very easy for Google to spot paid links. However, they continue to give top 10 rankings to sites having nothing but obvious paid backlinks.

To make things easy for Google engineers, I have created a top 10 list on how to spot paid links.

  1. Look for large, mostly irrelevant chunks of links on the footer or sidebar of web pages.
  2. Look carefully at sites that are text link ad affiliates.
  3. Look for words like “Sponsors” above a long list of links.
  4. Look for links to English sites on sites with non western alphabets.
  5. Find one “super link buyer”, and tag all the sites where they have links from as link sellers.
  6. Block links from blogs that do pay per post, pay per blog etc…
  7. Log into the text link brokers backends and scan their inventory lists.
  8. Look for static pages that have constantly changing outbound links.
  9. Look closely at blogs that openly advertise they sell links.
  10. Pay attention to paid link seller reports.

>-Jazz

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Comments

2 Responses to “10 Ways Google Can Spot Paid Links”

  1. Christopher Kata on October 8th, 2007 7:42 pm

    Great List! I agree that it’s not that difficult to spot paid links. Unfortunately, I think they are fighting a losing battle that one day will hurt them, while the other engines learn from the mistake, and capitalize on it!

  2. Sell Permanent Contextual Linking | Web Ad Classifieds Blog on October 10th, 2007 7:44 am

    […] are many ways Google can spot paid links. And whether paid links are evil or not is up for debate. Done properly, offering links through the […]

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