How Google Can Detect InLinks

by Patrick Altoft on November 20, 2008

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.

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Published in: Link Building

{ 1 trackback }

Matt Cutts, If This Paid Link Were A Snake It Would Have Bitten You In The Ass | Smackdown!: 11.21.08 at 1:53 pm

{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Matthew 20/11/2008 at 11:53 am: I’ve had access for about 18 months now but never bothered with it myself.
2 Dominic Hodgson 20/11/2008 at 11:54 am: 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
3 Matt 20/11/2008 at 1:16 pm: 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?
4 Dave Davis 20/11/2008 at 5:01 pm: “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.
5 sandossu 20/11/2008 at 5:06 pm: 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 ?
6 Luke Eales 21/11/2008 at 6:36 pm: 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.
7 Will 22/11/2008 at 8:58 am: Oh, I don’t know, a link with targeted anchor text suddenly appearing on post from 2 years ago looks pretty natural…Not.
8 Manish Pandey 22/11/2008 at 2:18 pm: “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?