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?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
Sites should be banned if 90% of there anchor text links are the same!!
No. Google still arn’t that good at spotting them.
Plus in this scenario where there is no concrete evidence, they might just strip the weight of these links, not penalise the site for link buying.
Unless they do check your profile and the rest of your links are clearly paid for.
It bothers me a little, even when building up respectable blogs. However, there’s not much we can do about it so just keep doing what you are doing. You can’t control who links to you or how with free links. Simple as
Cheers,
Glen
Sites should be banned if 90% of there anchor text links are the same!!
Rubbish, take a look at DJForums.com – most of their links have ‘DJ Forums’ in the anchor because it is the name of their brand. I’m sure Shoemoney has most of the links to his site as ‘Shoemoney’.
Yes, lets just ban them all *rolleyes*
I had an email about one of my sites claiming it was from a Google “Advisor”(???) asking me to change some paid links – I’ve not acted on it yet because I want to check the source and details. Anyone else seen those? Real or scam?
matboohoo, a manual review for sites with abnormal anchor texts would be more appropriate. If sites were algorithmically banned you could sabotage your competitors’ sites.
I have however been penalized for having abnormal anchor texts. I had a high proportion of anchor texts ‘keyword1 keyword2′ and ended up losing my rank 2 for that specific keyword but all my other rankings stayed the same.
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MJ Ray I highly doubt it was Google. If you want to email it to me I will take a look.
More comments from Patrick AltoftThe only great defence against this is to get a keyword domain. That way they can hardly de-rank bluewidgets.com for having too many links which just say “blue widgets”.
I think Google are changing their algorithum all the time at the minute with fairly big changes, I would hope that they wouldn’t penalise a site for what looks to be something dodgy it only reinforces what I am finding a lot a the minute about reviewing your site regularly and only get links from places you deem appropriate.
Great topic to bring up and I’ve been wondering about this factor as well. I always imagined if you had a unique enough site with enough quality content you stand a much much better chance at getting away with it. I guess if you must link in content like this just make sure its very on topic.
Sorry for hijacking the post, but it’s related and I really need some advice.
I started building Adsense-sites 3-4 months ago and was fairly succesful, making about $350 a month. Everything was going well, when I made a mistake and bought some links for one of my sites.
Shortly after the site was punished and is waaaaay down the index now. However it was the only I bought links for. I immediately removed the links and canceled the deal with the link broker.
However some of my other sites also was punished at the same time without having bought links. Maybe Google manually did this based on webserver or Adsense-ID?
My question goes like this:
I want to get going again. What should I do? Do I need to change to another server? Or can I just start building new sites and keep the linkbuilding whitehat?
Thanks a lot,
Max.
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Max how do you know they were punished? Maybe you just stopped ranking?
Do you have enough quality links to rank?
More comments from Patrick AltoftOf course I can’t be sure that I was punished. I just thought that it was strange that I would stop ranking on several sites, that were in top 5 on Google for their keywords all at once…
I think the paid links scenario is way over emphasised. Paid links work, simple as. As long as you know how to implement them carefully, they will bolster your rankings. As for anchor text that has gone down in importance slightly, my own linkedin profile is now not even on page one after I tried to optimise it with anchor text (it was position 4).
I think Google only really pays attention to big brands that engage in paid links as well as the really competitive industries – e/g finance, travel etc.
Interesting comment Biggles.
I specialise in a market/language that is quite small. Do you think that it might be harder to hide in the crowd there? That Google might easier detect bought links in a smaller language/country? I guess it depends on how many employees they have in that country..
The whole free links vs. paid links vs. quality links thing bothers me alot. In the land of the computer educated and bloggersville the passing of link juice is practised and appreciated almost universally among quality blogs. If Google seriously looked at links and questioned their origin and quality etc. it could cause some serious problems for anyone interested in tearing a competitor down rather than building themselves up.
Try this scenario, I need to get to the top spots in my keyword targets and am hanging at number 8. Rather than pushing my way up legitimately would it not be easier to find 50 spammy, prono or even illegal content sites and add my 7 competitors URLs to them on their behalf? Then report them to Google for their despicable behaviour? TA DA! Hot spot number 1 for me.
Surely there is not so much importance ion the links to cause a situation like this to arise?
Google will often look for a adsense publishers foot print, so if one site breaches their TOS then all sites on the publishers ID may be investigated. Just my experience.
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