Can Google detect where your link is placed on a page? For example, can G detect a blog roll section and then maybe penalize your link juice? How does Google determine if links are paid or organic? Seems like it would be base on manual submissions, which is kind of a joke if true. You could report competitors for one but also it seems 99% of paid links would go undetected?
They probably give different weights to links on different parts of the page. For example, footer links would be give little weight, links in the margins would be give a bit of weight and links in the middle of the page would be give the most weight. I know their process is much more complex and takes into accont many other factors.
Can Google detect where your link is placed on a page? Absolutely. For example, can G detect a blog roll section and then maybe penalize your link juice? They already do this. Google isn't going to disclose how they do it, but they do have 10K people to do manual reviews. It's not an exact science, but they can remove your PR or keep it from passing link juice if they "think" you are selling links. If your site is on "autos" and you have links to crappy diet pill sites or other low quality, especially unrelated niches, then you would certainly be in a higher risk category. Google wants you to add "nofollow" to external links - and they reason that if you aren't selling links or promoting your other sites, you shouldn't object to it.
I agree with what has been written by other members above me.. Maybe G cannot detect all of links in all of websites or blogs which are the paid links and which are not.. But if your websites/blogs are quite new and suddenly they get lots of traffics which are not natural, G might suspect your sites/blogs has bought links. Especially if the traffics come from paid directories..
I do not think that google can detect if the links or organic/genuine/paid. Even if 10k people work solely on this, it is not possible to view everysite, check for the links and take a decision on PR. IMHO, you need not worry on where your link is placed if you are solely looking for only backlink count.
yes they can know it from where you put the link, for example if you put them all together in the footer or in a blog roll. paid links is more hard for them to detect.
But, after many people went in a panic to add "nofollow" to their external links when they first announced it, Google is now overriding that and following the links anyway, so its really no point to it. Nofollow was really just introduced as a measure against comment spam and people adding their own links to the sites of others but, again, it really doesn't seem to matter anymore. I sold links on some of my old sites that weren't doing much, just to make a few bucks from them, and they point to the "crappy" sites you mentioned, but yet they still get good search engine traffic from Google and have for quite some time. I would have expected some sort of penalty, but it never happened for any of the sites. My conclusion is that people should just chill out and not worry about their outgoing links so much. I stopped using "nofollow" months ago and I'm glad I did.
You misunderstood what "nofollow" means. It NEVER meant the link wasn't going to be followed, it meant the link shouldn't be used to influence their ranking (link juice should not follow this link) - and google still uses it to this day and "nofollow" links provide no boost to SERPS for the site receiving the link. Not everyone is going to get caught, just like everyone who using cloaking or hidden text gets caught - it's a risk that you might get a penalty. There are a ton of threads on DP about how a site owner sold links and were upset that google had their PR set to zero.
Yes, I know what it means, but I'm just referring to how other people still interpret it. There have been a lot of articles published lately about Google now overriding "nofollow", but I think they're missing the point as obviously, like you said, these links were always being followed, but just no link juice is passing through.
Common sense should tell you G has no way to tell with any certainty if money changed hands for a certain link, although as already mentioned above other factors come into play.
I never understood why Wordpress [wordpress.org] software didn't have a "nofollow" option for those blog rolls or link lists.