Clever as Google are, how can they tell which links are paid and which aren't? Surely only the webmaster and advertiser can know that.
Speculation, but they could fairly easily look at links within an html container that said "sponsored" or "advertisement." Another scenario: A high PR page, for example...a PR8 page about weather, that links out to a casino website. High PR page linking out to a non-themed site. These are speculative, of course, but given what Google has achieved over the years, doesn't seem unreasonable that they could do it, if they choose to.
Google is the big boss, Its not a big thing for them to find if a link is paid or not, Thats what I read on Matt Cutts blog I guess.
Is it just me, or are other people getting slightly pissed off at the way Google think they can meddle with the content of people's sites? Talk about 1984.
But this is nothing new, we all know about black hat seos like hidden elements or -xxxx positions which can penalize sites which use this. Now they are going at irrelevant links, so most of the directories will go down and especially all sites like link clouds, as sites without any added value will be not counted as good back links (at least, if it will not cause a penalty)...
Google can make an 'educated guess' about which are paid links, but they will never know with anything close to 100% certainty. So I think they will generally 'discount', but not penalize paid links. Besides, there will always be ways to buy improved SERP rankings. Money makes the world go round.
Not only that, they now want us to report people who are buying and selling links. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/ Imagine if Matt Cutts ever heard about this. Most DP'ers would be screwed.
what if you have content management site for example and link to your customer sites these sites may not appear relevant to google but they are to your viewers.
Sounds to me like that's what they're trying to do - I'm lucky because I'm small scale - there's people on here who need to sell advertising to feed themselves.
What about hidden texts in web sites ? l was also using hiddent text on my olde sites like about 2 years ago, they were also good ways if you want to hide some keywords, also l may say l was tring to cheat the crawlers with that. But nowaways these techniques are very dengerouse and google can very easyly take you our of the line. and we dont try black seo : ) Thanks for the article. its great.
Agree, this post is BS. They are trying to find paid links by themselves with theirs algorithms, fair. But asking peoples to inform them...
I don't take it as anything against 'us' (whatever it could be - 'us'). We all could predict this - it will come sooner or later. All black, gray or yellow-hats... It all mean this same, content is the king - all but good content.
Hopefully lots of people report sites with Adwords as being paidlink. That should slow those guys at Google down...