Comments on: Free Links That Look Like Paid Links

By: Furminator

Furminator — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 08:45:06 +0000

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.

By: Justin Parks

Justin Parks — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 16:26:42 +0000

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?

By: Max

Max — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:22:21 +0000

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..

By: Biggles123

Biggles123 — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:26:20 +0000

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.

By: Max

Max — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:14:56 +0000

Of 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…

By: Patrick Altoft

Patrick Altoft — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:11:15 +0000

Max how do you know they were punished? Maybe you just stopped ranking?

Do you have enough quality links to rank?

By: Max

Max — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:21:32 +0000

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.

By: Ryan @ Linkbuildr

Ryan @ Linkbuildr — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 18:43:08 +0000

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.

By: paid to review

paid to review — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 15:50:11 +0000

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.

By: Charles

Charles — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:40:14 +0000

The 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”.