As more and more people wake up to the dangers of linkbuying a new issue arises – people are worrying about their free links in case Google mistakes them for paid links.
Imagine the scenario. Your friend runs a blog about general topics and owes you a favour. He finds a few blog posts that mention the word “car insurance” and links those to your car insurance affiliate site which he has reviewed to check it’s high quality.
No money changes hands and you are both happy that it’s a Google friendly arrangement.
Then one day Google sends a manual reviewer to look at your links and finds these keyword rich optimised links. They look like paid links but Google doesn’t know whether money has changed hands or not.
In a perfect world Google would take a look at the rest of your links and make a decision based on the number of potential paid links and the probability you have been buying links.
However well all know that Google isn’t always fair about this sort of thing.
Google has pretty much killed the keyword rich link – despite Matt Cutts best efforts to show that it’s OK to link to commercial sites with good anchor text.
Do you worry about this?
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