Anyone know about the anti-paid-link tool Google is building?

Apparently Matt Cutts said at PubCon in November they are working on a tool that will limit the PR-passing from any links they know to be paid, but still allow the others to pass authority.

Looking for more information on this, as it could be a game-changer in the link-building world. Thoughts?

 

Hi,

Personally, I don't think such kinds of tools would be fair since paid PRs could also be decent. Also, we could increase quality backlinks via many free channels like blogging, article submission and others.

all the best,

 

They would need clear evidence of a paid link..that would be tough enough to prove. Good luck to them on that one

 

I don't think Google would be dumb enough to divulge this information. If they gave out information about how they would do it, it would defeat the purpose. So the only people who know anything about this work for Google.

All anyone else can do is speculate. As an app developer who has dabbled in search, let me speculate.

Typically, identifying something, such as a paid link, or spam email, is done by tallying up a variety of factors, and if they add up beyond a threshold, the item is identified either positively or negatively. How much you weight each factor is calibrated by 'teaching' your system using known verified data, i.e. pages with paid links identified by human checkers. It gets complicated when the weight of one factor affects the weight of another factor (for example, the website the link is on belongs to so-and-so, who is known to have paid links on another site).

Note, none of the factors identify a link by themselves. You could have innocent instances for any of them. But you put them all together, and you get enough matches, the circumstantial evidence adds up, and you would guess that it is a paid link. Some factors I personally would include:

* link was embedded a long time after the content was published
* link formatting is identical to surrounding text
* link points to website which does not have spectacularly sticky content (no tweets, no facebook shares) but for some reason is getting a lot of links in a short period of time
* the page does have nofollow links, but there are a bunch of external dofollow links listed close together
* the only recent content updates on the origin page have all been links
* the page of origin has decent PR, 4 or higher
* the clickthru rate on the links is low.
* the external links are in list format as opposed to embedded
* the niches of the externals have nothing to do with each other
* the anchor of the link is identical to the anchor of other links the destination website received recently
* the anchor text is an exact match to the keywords the destination site is optimizing for

oh and also... analytics tells me the owner of the origin site and/or the owner of the destination site visited a site dealing in paid links. and... maybe... keywords to do with "link" and "payment" appear in the email messages of the gmail account of the owner of the website within 2 weeks before the link appeared

p.s. google i think you should hire me, to (a) do this stuff, and (b) shut me up

 

I do not think the link will pass both pagerank and authority or weight. Just prevent link from passing pagerank won't change the game.

 

If I understood that correctly it's not a tool, it will be an attribute like rel=nofollow. So if somebody buys link/advertisement on your site you will tag that link with this attribute

 

I never understood how anyone would know if a link is paid for or not? Does google just go by the site's reputation and ding all outgoing links from that site?

 

There's no way Google would know 100% which links were paid and which were not. Many deals can be arranged privately. As long as your links are legitimate (paid or not), I would not be very concerned if I were you.

 

It's nice to see forum members like monosodium reply to a thread with this kind of information. Rep added

 

Well, I personally would welcome a system that improves the rewards for people that build a quality website, versus trying to buy their way to the top.

 

I have to concur

 

I wounder what their error would would be. I would hate for some of my non paid links to be lumped in with the paid links