Purchased Link Penalties: There’s No Time to Waste

Can we also delete any wanted penalty links from search console?

This pointless debate really makes me chuckle. My website has thousands of naturally acquired, extremely authoritative and contextually relevant links (from government, local authority, university and charity websites). Yet I’m sitting at the bottom of page 2 for a very important keyword (having never purchased a link – other than a Yahoo directory listing), whilst I can clearly see 15 out of 19 sites ahead of me purchasing the spammiest pile of garbage links you’ll ever see in your life (they also regularly post relevant anchor test links in signatures on totally irrelevant blogs).

The lesson is – ignore what Google tells you to do (the webmasters guide is a joke). Just buy links in a sensible way because your chances of getting penalised vis-à-vis the rewards is minimal from what I can see.

I just wish I had the money to buy links.

Google’s using so many signals now and if the current trend towards personalized results driven by usage data, such as click stream, history and social continues, then paid link builders are going to have to work harder for the same results (Which has been the trend over the years anyway).

To answer Julie Joyce’s original question about highly competitive niches. If there are million websites out there that offer payday loans and your client is no different than most of them, I say they have a poor business model (when it comes to reliance on search traffic) and that in a perfect world, they probably don’t deserve the #1 spot or even first page for the term “payday loans”. How could a million websites offering the exact same service with no differentiation deserve the same #1 ranking?

So what do you tell or do for your client in those situations where what they offer is valuable to users and can be profitable enough to invest in, but is ultra competitive? I say, “Rethink your SEO strategy.” – Target the searcher, not the search. People have a reason that they need a payday loan. Peel off a bit of your strategy to target non-direct conversion path search terms. For example, try targeting terms like “electricity cut off”, “avoid eviction” or “how to avoid eviction”. Move your search strategy upstream in the sales cycle. There is almost no paid search competition for the phrases I mentioned above. Certainly, no payday loan websites offering relief to people in those situations are buying or organically ranking for those terms.

If I perform favors for the owner of a website and they link to my site, is that a vioation. Say I washed his car, maybe I took care of his dogs or maybe I performed another favor, you know….

More importantly, sites with worthless content that rank well = paid links. Why does a site that has nonsense gibberish rank well? Has to be links. Good chance they are paid links. Punch that in the algo. Weigh content and page position to calculate questionable inbound links.

Furthermore, Google does those comparison ads for mortgage rates, credit cards, they just bought at a travel tech site that handles airfares. Number one search company now owns the results??

Off topic. Groupon purchase. If I were a coupon site I would file antitrust case. Google owns search, they can’t possibly own the content via coupon site or provide credit card comparison data or travel air fares.

Do no evil. Hating Demand Media. What did they do? Provide lots o content. Sure its poor but who decides that level of quality.

Google is crossing the line. Microsoft was the evil empire perhaps they are now the rebel alliance and Google has gone to the Darkside.

I am still waiting for somebody to respond to July Joyce’s comments.

I just gave a dodgy indian agency $100 to buy a bunch of links and point them at BruceClay.com. Guess you guys are gonna vanish from the SERPs any day now!

(or, wait, is there a fundamental flaw in this…? Hmmm)

Can I just buy links for a competitor and report them? Buy anonymously (or pretend to be an agency, whatever), point them at a competitor, and watch them climb the rankings, then fall when the paid link strategy is uncovered.

Just hypothetically speaking. Or is the defence “No, honest Google, it wasn’t us that bought those links – look, do a full audit of both mine and the selling site’s business to see!” Never going to work = paid links are here to stay.

Google makes changes quite often to their algorithm, so to buy links on a consistent basis is playing with fire. You may think you are working under the radar, but most paid links are detectable. If Google decides to crack down on your site, then they can tell which links are paid links to a certain degree.

Great Post

We will just keep siloing sites, creating keyword anchors between pages within silos and write and distribute content. While we never ever guarantee a specific result for any client, we can normally tell that we will see Top 10 results within a 3 to 6 month period by following a set methodology for our content distribution which ends up giving the sites deep links to the pages that matter. Some attention to site structure (as Bruce teaches) can go a very long way. The money that people spend on buying links could be better spent on writing better content and much more of it instead.

How does Google know what a paid link is vs. free?

Whilst I recognise the need to solve the problem of purchased links algorithmically, I can’t begin to imagine how this can be achieved. And clearly neither can Google – at least not yet. If Google is to avoid the risk of administering damaging penalties to innocent businesses whose competitors have pointed purchased links at them, then the best that any algorithm can do is surely to do no more than negate the beneficial impact of paid links. Google can detect paid links but not who is responsible for their acquisition. Until the next Larry and Brin come up with the next generation algo, large scale random manual inspections by Google may be the best deterrent.

So what if you buy traffic from google which propels a site into the top 1000 on this list: http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/

Which doesn’t have a single no-follow. And pulls up in google search.

Wonder how much that link from google weighs in the algorithm.

Is there a difference between buying links and buying link building services (that do things like place links in forums and blogs?)

The only way to end the practice of link building is if Google stops rewarding companies for back links. Also, if “mentions” on the web becomes a bigger factor, then things will change, and probably not for the better. Of course the no follow links will not even matter, and things could just get worse.

Google isn’t the policeman of the internet, they are a private company. So no wonder link building = evil and Ad words is fantastic. There is nothing in this world that isn’t fixed, staged, choreographed or rigged. Nothing that isn’t fueled by ulterior motives. It’s just like Drugs in Sport – the second they ban or police one method, 14 are going to replace it.

Obviously a link from a PR-8 page is worth a lot more than a link from a PR-0 page… So why does Google publicly display the PR of every page in its toolbar?
That just makes it easy for link sellers to set their price and tempting for link buyers that want links from high PR pages.

I think that if buying and selling links (that pass PR) is that big a problem, then Google should stop publicly displaying PR.
At least that would make it harder for the buyers/sellers to determine the price.

My two cents

Cheers
James

Who is the penalty going to apply to? If one buys links to competitor sites are they going to suffer in the rankings or will Google somehow find out who did the buying and punish the buyer? How would they do that?

Hi Bruce,
I would prefer to live in a world with less spam, just like everyone. I also want to stay in business and feed my family. So when my competitors get links from steel barn sites, casino sites, Alaska fishing tours etc it makes it difficult to not at least consider doing that too.
At local networking events there is a salesperson who goes from meeting to meeting selling links from “2,000 unrelated websites” and they are charging $495 per month to have links gradually added to their groups.
I have not done it, of course, but it is a financially compelling arguement to do that for near sure results versus hiring someone to design an awesome info graphic that might or might not get any link love. I am looking at sites the have been ranking well for years but their bank links are junky.

So it is true…my competitor can buy a ton of links pointing to my site and hurt me?

I agree that paid links are out of question, but it gets difficult to avoid in large corporations not just for the reasons you stated. It normally isn’t some rogue SEO in a large company buying links. Sites cross link all the time as an afterthought to larger deals, but these sites often have gobs of trust and know Google personally.

Google definitely will never allow paid links publicly. But I just question how actively they will pursue and punish those that do. It is true like he mentioned in the 2nd video it can lead to seriously skewed results and the end users (and the legitimate competitors) suffer the consequences.

Telling SEO’s not to buy links because it’s only going to rage a war price, is akin to telling SEM’s not to bid above $1.00 on any given keyword because it’s going to raise the prices.
This is true in every industry, the one who pays most gets the most. Front page ads caost more than other ads full page ads cost more than half page. whoever has the most money will advertise more and essentially be a bigger brand.
The same for link building whoever can pay more will buy more links and rank better.
What about SEO agencies? Small new start ups can’t afford to pay for good SEO’s as much as bigger organizations. Should we be telling website owners not to pay to much for SEO because it’s only going to raise the prices?

Back to the issue at hand. It’s going to be a war whether we can outsmart Google or not. Those who will,will rank better making their money spent worthwhile…

Well, I’ve seen Google hit some of the spamming websites in the recent past, but I haven’t seen the sites buying links get hit yet. Hopefully in the near future. I’ve got faith in Google.

Buying links to influence SERP’s is wrong.

Google should hit companies who delve in this sort of proactive with penalties.

No-one should be able to buy their way to the top of generic search results.

If companies want to buy their way to the top, AdSense and not buying links should be the route.

Improving the user experience on your site adding value and combining offline and online marketing strategies is the way forward to enhance the quality and relevance of your site. That way you will naturally attract links from relevant sites.

So I could take down a Fortune 50 website by buying links to it? Cool!!!

As a new marketer I find the whole SEO business confusing. I am serious about this question as a newbie: I had two offers, one from a company that said they would automatically send out links for me, and a second one who could recommend links that I could use to submit to, one by one. I chose the company and paid them a little–really not much money–to give me some ideas, but when I am submitting my site, I am choosy and I do it one by one.
For those of you who are obviously experts, am I doing it the right way, the wrong way and what do you recommend?
I am a true relationship advisor in a sea of people who sound like they are, but they aren’t. A little advice?
Don

“If an agency advises you to buy paid links for SEO purposes, you should find another agency. For an agency or service to do this to a client is an unethical act. Our advice is buyer beware.”

These statement’s are absurd. Although I no longer work at an agency, I would always have the risk/reward discussion as it relates to paid links with my clients. If an agency doesn’t let you know about the potential payoffs and downsides of paid links they are doing a much bigger disservice.

Paid links work and have the ability to dramatically increase rankings and leads/revenue that are associated with those increases. Like all things in business, they carry a cost and risk. A good SEO consultant/agency would be able to evaluate and articulate the potential risks and rewards based on the site’s link profile, history, tactics being considered, and potential rankings increases. Having listened to the recommendations, it should be up to the client to ultimately decide whether or not they want to undertake this risk.

You indicate that “There is a paid links penalty, it is severe, and you cannot hide from it,” yet neither you or Matt Cutts has shown what this penalty might be. A penalty for the link buyer? Or just a loss in pagerank from the sellers site?

The premise is that links to a site indicate relevancy and importance. While this was true a long time ago, the value of this premise has obviously degraded and will continue. I have a site now that ranks at the top of two valuable query strings and there are very few inbound links, so inbound links are not a need in order to be at the top. The challenge for the search engines is how to determine a “valuable” link verses a “bogus” link. Are people really following an adword thinking, “I bet this is a really relevant link for me!” Obviously these get thrown out. How do you yourself determine if a link has value? There is the challenge for the search engines, matching our logic in determining a link of value.

The bottom line is if you want to rank in any even remotely competitive niche, then purchasing links is required. Even paid links have editorial standards. And with a difficult economy, a many webmasters are willing to monetize their websites by most means.

I wish Google would penalize sites that are buying paid links, but I haven’t seen much action in this area as far as my client sites are concerned. On behalf of my clients, for whom I do strictly white hat SEO, I have reported competitor sites that are blatantly both buying and selling links, over a period of years. But the buying of paid links continues in all of the reported cases. I have yet to see a single one of these sites penalized. The contrary is true — they just do better and better in the SERPs.

I have pretty much given up reporting them. It doesn’t do any good. Yet it would not be difficult for a Google employee to go look at some of these sites and draw the same conclusions as me. Why doesn’t Google have hundreds of employees doing nothing but following up on the reported cases? Too much to handle? Give me a break. If they can send employees out in cars to photograph the whole planet, inch by inch, they could do a heck of a lot better at manually following up on the most egregious reported cases of paid links, and actually DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!

Until they do, I share Bruce’s pain, but I personally think this is all a bunch of noise out of Google, with the idea that if they make enough noise about how they are going to crack down on it, it will appear that they are doing their job. And maybe the noise will make a few more people hesitate before buying links.

I know people will say oh, but what about competitors “setting you up.” You know what? Before Google penalizes a perceived buyer and seller, they can contact all parties. It can be done! Not rocket science. If Google were to pick say the top 250 categories of sites, and then analyze the top SERPs in each category for perceived paid links, and then manually investigate, they could then BAN the guilty parties in each niche, with much fanfare. That’s the way to do it. Make some examples, scare some key players. Word would get out real fast.

But they don’t do anything like this. Why not?

You tell me Google is getting serious about paid link penalties — at this point, I’ll believe it when I see it. And so far, I am seeing no evidence of a concerted, meaningful effort to root it out.

I recently moved from a position where i worked as an in-house SEO providing 100% white hat links. Having visited many SEO seminars and hearing the industry leaders preach about not buying links i was startled to find that having contact them (some of the biggest names) and discussed proposals for assisting in my SEO activities, that they all cited paid links as the majority source of their link development activities!

Sad but true!

While I can appreciate what Matt says I also feel it’s also slightly hypocritical of Google to suggest paid links are bad when they sell Ad Sense which is a paid result. I don’t participate in paid links but the reality is most of my competition does. As a result most of these people for now are raking in a fortune. While it’s being suggested that there’s an inevitable penalty the reality is most of us white hat SEO professionals have been waiting for it forever. Most of these companies are prepared to take an eventual temporary ranking drop for huge earnings because they know that they can also recover any penalties that they get hit with. Most of the pro companies that do link wheels etc. scrub their links in a way that looks natural to the search algorithms. You’d think that when there’s a huge spike of links it might raise some red flags but with so much of it going on it’s not humanly possible to monitor without being reported. It’s only the most blatant of abuse that seems to be getting hit. Even then a lot of stuff remains untouched.

While there’s a lot of people being really successful abusing the system there’s just as many being every bit as much ethically. It just takes some time, creativity, and the ingenuity that others don’t have.

I do agree, but do you really think Google cares enough to do anything? They’re more concerned with the spam clogging up the SERPs at the moment.

Google have to been seen as active in this field and cannot be seen to allow non relevant lunk development.
To many seo’ers are scared of being associated with paid link building, Google have millions of sites in their index and would be near on impossible to determine what is a relevant purchased link.

Big issue which I think should be strangled to the forefront of SEO discussion again.

It’s been a long time since Google cracked down on paid links, but it’s progressed so little since the initial wave.

Brent, I wasn’t dogging on your comment, but after re-reading mine I can see how you thought so. I totally agree with your perspectives. I just tire of the whole paid links thing (as you can tell).

Even though most think of me as a link builder, the vast majority of what we do is create content. Therefore my angst with the scrapers and the spammers.

I love the “what you can do” advice. If you bought links for yourself (with exact anchor text) and you remove them or nofollow them, chances are you will fall in rankings for that exact phrase.

So remove those paid links but then pay someone to get you “free links”

Yes, you’ll be safe from google, but who cares if you’re safe sitting at #20 in the rankings?

people have talked for years about “can’t I just buy links for my competitors and get them banned?” I know that chances are, if you buy links for your competitor, they will probably rise in rankings, and chances are that they’ll get penalized is about 1 in several hundred thousand.

Yes, we’ve heard this stuff before, “Look out, Google can penalize you”. Yes they can, and those who buy links know that but we also know that most of the top 10 sites in any major market are dominated by link buyers. I’d rather take the risk and be in the top 10 then play it safe and not rank.

if you buy links for your competitors, chances are your competitors will just rank higher and not get banned… that’s the chances.

One more thing Arnie, I think my point of that post was that it would be difficult for Google to penalize the actual site purchasing the links because how would they know it wasn’t a competitor buying the links. I know it’s been discussed ad nauseam before on V7n, WF, SEOChat but if they are barking penalties to come.. it just doesn’t compute for me!

Arnie,

I totally agree.

Affiliate and Adsense-Only sites ranking via profile links and blog comment links. It’s frustrating to see.

And, FYI, anytime Google brings up killing paid links, I’ll bring up the fact that they are picking and choosing which paid links are “bad” — my time on forums tells me the majority of people active in this industry haven’t been around since 2007, so if it’s redundant to you feel free to not read it!

Hasn’t web behavior taught you anything? People need to be told 10,000 times before it sinks in anyways ;)

How about just don’t use a link broker that forces you to fit into a format? A contextual link in the body via link request is much harder to spot than sitewide links rotating in new domains on a regular basis.

I really despise buying links, especially automated. But when I’m faced with a project and a target, I need to show some effort and results. I’m terrible at link baiting and my attempts at outsourcing have failed to justify the cost to say the least.

The only way I can actively grow my backlinks is to manually ask for a link placement. I really really don’t want to pay the guy anything because Google will punish us, but regardless how I explain this to the webmasters they still demand payment..

It’s ok if it’s only a personal blog or an information portal website, but it’s a commercial corporate website with budgets and traffic and revenue targets, which leaves me with no choice.

I think this whole discussion is odd as paying for links (with or without no follow) is an indication how serious you are about your business, and that you are willing to advertise/spend money on the internet like you do in magazines TV, etc, It’s the reality of the Internet economy, and as soon a corporation like Google start to fight this, they are fighting reality.

In many cases the sites that rank high are simply sites that contain content which people are searching for. These are not scam sites, just proper businesses doing a proper job to build up an audience.

Maybe Google is missing the point on all this?

On a personal level i love this though as i do not have a huge budget to buy links.

My first thought after reading this was “are we still talking about this?” I swear with a little research I could find extremely similar posts dating back 4, 5 or even 6 years ago.

We can all find examples where paid links hurt someone’s site. Recent Google updates and SERP changes are getting some press. But when Bruce sounds the alarm, it tends to get people’s attention.

I am sure the next thing we will do is debate what is a paid link and what isn’t…. similar to Brent’s comment above.

Personally, I would love to see Google, Bing and others do a much better job of detecting & punishing spam. Spam comments, spam content, spam links, all of it. In my opinion spam is doing much more to harm the SERPs and pollute the web than paid links. All of us see it every day.

I’d rather lose rankings to a fortune 500 company that can out spend me, than a spammer willing to pound forums for links.

However, it seems Google is focused on link renters and they get to make the rules. So for now, link buyer/renter beware.

I have to agree that obvious link buying is a dumb thing to do and what constitutes “obvious” is going to become more and more refined as Google refocuses on fighting spam. There are quite a few discussion threads about why sites got spanked this past week in the SERPs though none of them mention link profiles. The claim that some “low” quality sites like eHow and Mahalo didn’t get hurt by the update, but they don’t mention what the link profiles look like on the sites that did lose traffic.

I’ve seen a site drop from mid first page for numerous commercial, high traffic, two word phrases to low on the 3rd page overnight. Looking at their backlinks it was obvious they were buying links. There IS a penalty for getting caught and it IS severe.

When I start a new job, or look at purchasing a domain or online business, one of the first questions I ask is “have you ever purchased links?”. The back door deals will never be detectable (I’ll send you $100 to write a blog post and link to me) but obvious large scale link buying is only good for domains you are willing to burn and walk away from.

Hey thanks for the post! Unfortunately it’s come a little late for my website, although I knew what I was doing when I was buying the links you always have this mentality that since it’s working great you may as well keep doing it.
So the end result for me is that I was ranking highly for some very competitive search terms for the last 2 years and all of a sudden I’m on page 2, if not 3. I believe either my home page is penalised or that the 2-3 major keywords my paid link purchases were centered around are penalised.
This happened just before Christmas (Google didn’t wait till after my holidays!) and I still don’t have my rankings back.
I’ve removed all my paid links and reworked my home page with new content etc and i’m about to do a reconsideration request for the second time now that the paid links are gone.
I was wondering if you had an opinion on whether now I’ve removed the links I will be given a second chance? It’s cost our business thousands of dollars… I wish I had the benefit of hindsight!!

I don’t want to sound like broken record, but at some level everybody buys links.

Not that I even buy links outright, but this really annoys me.

Be it a membership to the chamber of commerce, BBB, SEOmoz or SEMPO (for the directory, the Yahoo/BOTW directory, press releases, or ads on sites which do not know enough to employ rel=”nofollow” tags. I know this argument is long played out, but if they do end up penalizing enforcing strict penalties for the link sales sites what’s to stop my competitors from buying links & using my site as the destination URL?

Is it not true that Google is changing the way the web works to fit into their algorithm in this scenario? Shouldn’t the responsibility of identifying and devaluing paid links fall on to their shoulders & not ours?

Did recent BCI testing reveal something new about paid links influencing ranking results? As I understood it recently, the majority of penalization’s were happening to the site selling links, not the site buying links.

I will say one thing, sites like TLA would be very easy to track & identify.. so I could see those participants seeing fallback soon. Between this and content farms, we could be seeing a cleaner index soon =)

This is such a complicated and hard thing to deal with. On the one hand, you can’t just let people buy their way to the top of the SERPS via links. On the other, you can’t penalize a site by its inbound links, or you could buy your way to the top of the SERPS via links…to your competitors. How do you not only protect yourself from people in your company who might foolishly buy links, but also protect yourself from unethical competitors who can go out and buy links to your site and send spammy links your way? How does Google even know the difference?

My biggest issue with saying paid links will hurt you concerns industries where everyone buys links. What advice would you give clients in ultra-competitive niches like gambling and payday loans? How can those guys avoid link buying?