I know this has been talked about before, in fact I started a similar thread a few weeks back. I'm just wondering what everyone's experience of this has been since the last update now some more time has passed. Does everyone think that Google has become better at identifying and ignoring paid links? or even penalising them? that certainly seems to be my experience
google can't penalise paid links. G can ignore them but can't penalize, because this way I could "buy" a bunch of links for my competitors. Even ignoring them is a little too difficult because is hard to demonstrate that it is paid.
Most people don't quite understand this fact. @ OP - in my opinion Google is just bluffing to scare the people. Google is not God.
Really? I have seen a lot of people on here saying they think Google is penalising/ignoring paid links now, do you have any experience of increasing sites positions using paid links over the last 3 months?
Yes you are exactly correct! They have no ways to detect paid links ,and it would be very difficult for them!
That's the whole point of this exercise! Google want to improve their algo's detection of paid links by using user supplied data. Google aren't bluffing. They really do want to stop people buying PR.
Think so ? A lot of directories are based on phpLD. Maybe Google can detect this and ignore the site.. I'm not saying they do this - but technically it can be easier to do than you think..
I can't really see that it would be that difficult for Google with all their money and resources to work out a reasonably effective way to detect paid links, surely not 100%, but 75% or so. For example Sites with large numbers of outbound links in the footers and sidebars could easily be identified, high pr sites linking to lots of low pr sites, sites linking to lots of nonrelated sites. I would imagine they could easily monitor the anchor text of inbound links to a site and if 80% of new links in one month said "red shoes" for example it would be obvious they were paying for those links. Don't forget Google turn over billions each year and have a large team of developers working on their algo
Even with all the money and resources, it will be very hard for google to detect paid links....Even if they do they people will start buying links for their competitors hoping they would get penalized by google..Anyway I think it is a bad idea for google to do this because for webmasters who don't have high traffic site, they depend upon their pagerank to sell some links and make some bucks..
Google never said they were going to penalise for buying/selling links. They just want to stop people from manipulating their search results with paid links. Stopping the flow of PR from paid links will help to do this.
Exactly, they don't need to penalise as such, just remove any paid links from their calculations. My experience is telling me that this is happening. It is bad for small webmasters as selling links is a good source of income but Google aren't concerned about small webmasters making $10 from a sidebar link, they're concerned about how many $billions they make each year!
G will most likely target/downgrade/penalize out of context links (gambling links on a .edu about weather stations). But it is hard for them to do this at a really granular level (of their own admission -->http://www.seomoz.org/blog/search-engines-say-ok-to-payperpost-services). i.e a post by post basis on blogs. I think the big G are completely unable to genuinely pull this off (target paid-links.. in any shape or form.. and no Matt Cutts that is not a challenge ), but I think they want people to think they can, which they hope in turn will both deter the appropriate people and also encourage the appropriate people. The biggest reason the G wants to try give the impression of stamping out SE tinkering by SEOs is that it has to have a strong industry (and wider..) perception that its search results are quality. And the motivation is simple. Money. If advertisers (who know that search converts MUCH better than the content channel.. but are yet to realize the conversion of type-in domain traffic!) have the perception that search is quality they will spend more. If they think it is spammy shite, they will take their dollars elsewhere (at best to the competition.. at worst offline). So.. let the G and Matty, have their brew-ha-ha about paid links, and let them (really) convince the whole wide world that their results are purrfect. (So, we all stay in a job..) and as a result let the flow of ad dollars grow and grow.. making everything we all do that much more lucrative.. and then let's all just quietly go about our business.. secure in the knowledge that the G is not really after "us" or "paid links".. but just trying to make more money and trying to get the marketing department for EVERY company in the world to keep the faith.. and keep moving those ad dollars online. Because we all know that unless we start seeing some enormous big G sweatshops making human involved search (on a MASSIVE) scale they cannot ever hope to really truly distinguish "editorial" links from "paid" links.
Exactly. I don't understand why so many people have trouble differentiating a filter from a penalty. You competitors can b uy links for you all they want - it's not going to hurt you because those links will simply be filtered out for PageRank and your competitors will be merely giving you free advertising. You can still sell links as long as you can find people to but them. It is a legitimate form of advertising and there is nothing to stop you from doing that or your customers from buying such advertising. I think you seriously underestimate both the human resources (ingenuity) and the technololgical resources Google has at their disposal.
I couldn't agree more, people talk about Google as if it is one guy in a shed somewhere with hardly any skills or resources! I'm pretty sure any decent programmer could find a way to do identify paid links given enough time, and Google have hundreds of programmers!