How Google Can Detect InLinks

by Patrick Altoft on / 13 responses

Everybody is talking about InLinks today. I’ve had access to the system for quite some time but haven’t ever bought or sold a link using it.

Before you get too excited about the opportunity please take some time to actually evaluate the sites offering links. You get to see the post title and a snippet of text before you purchase so it’s not hard to identify the site.

When I first took a look at the system I found that Engadget and Gizmodo were both selling links for $10 per month. Fantastic! Of course it was just scraper sites purely made for selling text links.

Secondly take some time to think about the nature of InLinks compared to normal blog links. A normal blog post has links added at the point of publishing – they don’t have keyword rich links added 6 months down the line.

You won’t get a penalty for adding external links to your old blog posts but it would be easy for Google to give them less weight.

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.

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Comments

Read the 12 comments below, or add your own!

November 20, 2008 at 11:53am

I’ve had access for about 18 months now but never bothered with it myself.

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November 20, 2008 at 11:54am

and if this is the same inLinks that has been available on TLA for some time, its a plugin that is named something like tla-randomnumber.php, since most wordpress installations have that open to the public, its not hard for google to find it

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November 20, 2008 at 1:16pm

Hey Patrick – Not sure what you mean by “Of course it was just scraper sites purely made for selling text links.”. Does this mean that it wasn’t Engadget and Gizmodo?

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November 20, 2008 at 5:01pm

“A normal blog post has links added at the point of publishing – they don’t have keyword rich links added 6 months down the line.”

You hit the nail on the head here Patrick. I can see a lot of bloggers shooting themselves in the foot with this one. If adding links to an old post 4-6 months down the line isn’t a massive footprint, I don’t know what is.

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November 20, 2008 at 5:06pm

It would be easy for Google to lower the value of any link, but this might not be the best option for them. Which links are 100% trustful so they won’t lower their value ?

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November 21, 2008 at 6:36pm

Maybe Google’s algorithm should flag up sites that add new external links anything more than a few weeks after the original publish date. These pages could then be hand reviewed by Google’s human editors.

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November 22, 2008 at 8:58am

Oh, I don’t know, a link with targeted anchor text suddenly appearing on post from 2 years ago looks pretty natural…Not.

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November 22, 2008 at 2:18pm

“A normal blog post has links added at the point of publishing – they don’t have keyword rich links added 6 months down the line.”

What would you suggest Patrick, about the link that TechCrunch gave to MediaWhiz and inLinks??

Well it can be easily detected by Google comparing the post data of today and six months earlier to check if any changes has actually occurred? But the point here is what about the new pages that are coming everyday like the TC…they are editorial links, but they still pass PageRank. You might compare them with anchor text links, but any kind of link from sites like TechCruch and Engadget is a jewel. Isn’t it?

Thoughts?

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March 2, 2009 at 6:28pm

Not bad,I have joined Inlinks,hope sell more links…lol

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May 4, 2009 at 12:28pm

I wonder does google have different value for links that are on pages with good ranking compared to that one that are on pages with no ranking.

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June 29, 2010 at 1:17pm

been with tla since early 2007 and used inlinks since they've offered it. generated a steady, solid income in the high hundreds for two of my blogs. :)

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September 22, 2011 at 9:31pm

I am trying to get this going on my site http://www.khofoz.com and get the page rank going but for some reason i am not able to do so, if anyone has any recommendation of a plugin or any idea that might help??

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