Last week I was thinking a lot about how the paid link industry is faring under the new Google guidelines. I spotted a number of sites both large and small ranking on paid links alone and thought about reporting them.
In the past I have reported paid links a couple of times but only when the site buying or selling them was a direct competitor and ranked higher than me.
Do you reort paid links? Do you think it is a good thing to do? Let me know in the comments.
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.
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I guess reporting links for direct competitors is something I should start doing.. never thought about, but I sure will do now!
No, I think it’s not my business.
This industry has lost a lot of ethics and respect within, especially when you consider most people have sites which are quite old now which dominate rankings from links bought years, you wouldn’t want someone to go and report that now would you.
If your being outranked work harder and make your site better don’t just go and tell the teacher, If it’s a spam site then fair enough but not just because someone is outranking you that is unethical within the community and reminds me of that kid in every school who would tell the teacher everything because it made him look good in the teachers eyes.
Shame on anyone who reports paid links
I think that it is work enough to compete in the SERPS without getting into reporting competitors. I do not like the idea of reporting unless there is something really wrong like 302 hijacking etc.
Let’s compete on skills and not on ability to report!
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If a site is outranking another site purely based on thousands of low quality (obvious) paid links then you have a choice. Either sit back and wait for Google to find the links and devalue them, go buy the same links yourself and risk a penalty or report them and speed up the process of getting the links devalued.
You are right in saying SEO’s have a community but I don’t feel under any obligation to protect an SEO who simply goes out and buys 10,000 low quality links to a client’s site.
To be clear, I’m still undecided on whether reporting paid links is the right thing to do or not, hence the reason for this post. I want to know what everybody else thinks.
More comments from Patrick AltoftRather than help Google fix their faulty algorithm that cannot detect every paid link in the name of trying to curtail the efforts of a competitor, why not buy a paid link on the same site? (You can’t beat them, join them)
You report paid links for a particular site and you may find that you could have benefited from the same site that has now been placed under Google’s radar.
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That’s one way of looking at it (and one I often use).
The problem is that often a lot of the links either have already been devalued or will be devalued next week. Fine if you have a large budget but not an option for every site.
More comments from Patrick AltoftI haven’t yet and am not sure yet if I will. The problem we face is that Google doesn’t like paid links, but due to the size of the internet and how many billions of links there are, it’s impossible for the practice to be stamped out 100%. This means I can do a few things.
I can either play my part by reporting every suspect link that I come across but realise that it would be like throwing a peanut at Jupiter to try knock it out of orbit.
I can ignore them and just concentrate on what I do and try to build natural links with link baiting.
I can just think, what the heck and start buying up links.
Or, work in a very specific niche where only a few links are needed.
Either way you are stuck and it seems the best way is to just be competitive and use all the tactics you can think of, including reporting although you might be guilty your self of violating the terms that you are reporting someone else of breaking.
It still leaves me stuck as to what to do
I figure it’s not worth my time and I’ve never reported any. Maybe that will change but not in the very near future.
This may sound like a naive question, but I wonder: is a contest (either give away prizes or money) to promote link-backs considered a paid link?
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It certainly isn’t counted as a natural link. It is doubtful Google would give the link sellers a penalty since most of them didn’t get any payment. I expect if all the links had to have a certain anchor text (such as when John Chow asked people to link to him with the anchor text “make money online”) the site the links were pointing to might get a penalty or filter of some sort applied.
More comments from Patrick AltoftAbsolutely not. Google needs to deal with its algo issues on its own. I’m not into playing with Narc Karma. I’d rather work harder than go down that road.
Hmm…haven’t reported anyone yet but I might start to report my direct competitors…
No paid links, nothing to report.
Based on what I saw by a show of hands at PubCon, just about everyone is buying links. But when the raised their hands, what kind of link buying did they have in mind?
Are we talking about reporting the people who buy thousands of junk links OR the one’s who rent a few high quality links for both traffic and link juice OR the one’s who spend a few thousand bucks to develop some unrelated link bait to get links to their site? What about the links coming from articles written by a paid writer and provided to some editor to post on their site? Isn’t that a paid link?
I don’t report paid links, and don’t like the idea of “tattling.” Work harder, do a better job, and let the bad guys hang themselves (they usually do, sooner or later).
I’m incredibly torn over this. Checking out backlinks of several competitors of mine who are ranking in top 10 in Google and Yahoo, it’s obvious that a big chunk of their links are paid. Now, they’re slick about it so it would be hard to detect looking at any one single link. But it’s obvious what to me that they’re paid. Some guys just do a better job than others of hiding them.
I will err on the side of karma, but man alive is it tempting to rat these guys out, especially when their kicking my ass so badly.
This is a funny debate. I’ll bet most of the people claiming they’d never report paid links probably do, they just want to appear honorable in front of the other SEO’s and avoid revenge.
There is too much money on the table to let any advantage slip. Especially one as easy to execute as reporting obviously paid links to your direct competitors.
Nothing to be ashamed of reporting paid links, if you agree with Google’s philosophy. If a crook is never reported, they don’t repent, they just keep stealing.
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