Link Building this Week (47.2008)
22 Nov
Google’s war on paid links seems to have effect. WeBuildPages’ shift away from buying links is a great example of this. The ‘report paid links’ form is scaring webmasters that buy (or have bought) links, because lots of paid links are easy to spot and competitors can -and often will- file a report. While there are still ways to buy links kind of legitimately, I can imagine that it’s quite difficult to have to explain to a client that they’ve received a penalty because of the links you’ve bought for them.
And also:
- Andy Sernovitz explains how you can get a blogger to write about you
- Aaron Wall shows the (link building) differences between long tail and core category words
- Ann Smarty listed a few link building and blog pitch euphemisms
and talked about keyword rich internal anchor text links - Michael Martinez wrote a good post about link addiction (and, yes, I am addicted…)
I’ve been waiting for this.
I didn’t know the ‘fight’ against paid links had gone this far.
Good reporting, wouldn’t have spotted it.
The thing I always wonder here is this: If links that can be “spotted” as paid are discounted or even treated as negative, why can’t you go out and buy 1,000 paid links for your competitor and wash them right off their target terms? It’s the same-old, same-old question of “can a link ever hurt you?” I’ve seen Matt Cutt’s go on record saying “no.” So I wonder about that in the context of paid links as well. What do you think?
Good post.I have noticed this as well.People who have paid links on their sites are having their page rank dropped quite often.This should be a sign that Google does not like paid links too much.
Well now I don’t fancy having paid links on my site.It makes my site horrible indeed and won’t help my cause either than having a few bucks instead.
I’m with Adam. If paid links are really that risky (to those being linked to, rather than those doing the linking), why can’t I just go over to the cheapest, crappest and most obvious link vendors and pay them a few hundred dollars to bowl my competitors out of the SERPs?