Google Hiring Moles to Check Link Buy/Sell ?

I was wondering around SEOSPHERE when I came upon a post on SEOMOZ by Rand Fishkin.
Rand is basically talking about 8 things in the SEO world for which he himself is confused.

Check point #7 where he writes -

What do you guys think?

 

Should I be worried that someone contacted me and want to buy banner on my site ?

 

Probably they now start to go underground. That’s the only way to track out those who conducted link sales through PM

 

I don't buy any links but this could potentially be very bad.

That being said it would need to be done on a massive scale to have any kind of effect.

Sounds unlikely to me.

Cheers

APHP

 

I'm pretty sure they already do that but on a small scale. Real people would register a username here and reply to threads on buy/sell forum and then when they get the url of the site selling link through PM, they will analyse the site and look for common patterns to improve their algorithm. If sites are selling vast amounts of links or have authority status and are passing their link juice, then probably a manual penalty is imposed.

 

This is impossible to be done manually

 

Everyone is a mole, you can report anyone through Webmaster Tools. Google has stated clearly that they take the reports seriously and act on them if deemed credible.

The link buying and spam report submit feature is prominently displayed on the right hand side when you log in.

 

Sounds like that would be a giant undertaken manually with billions and billions of sites.

 

Some of the biggest sites even have written that they sell banner space, how is this different to links selling.

 

From Google's reconsideration request page:

Tell us more about what happened: what actions might have led to any penalties, and what corrective actions have been taken. If you used a search engine optimization (SEO) company, please note that.

Perhaps this is your answer.

 

Google states clearly that there is no penalty for advertising is it does not pass PR and is stated clearly as such.

Selling links and hiding the "sponsors/advertisers" text on a graphic so it can't be spidered and not using no-follow would be considered link selling.

Essentially, PR is like a personal endorsement and advertising doesn't qualify since it's paid for.

Lots of gray area to play with but the underlying concept is pretty straight forward.

 

the end will come when anyone be rewarded for reporting paid links! heh

 

It's pretty easy to track down web sites selling links. All you need to do is pick a competitive industry like hotels or car hire, see who's ranking in the top 10, do a backlink analysis and then see where the links are coming from.

In most cases it's obvious that a site is selling links. Look for short anchor text out of context on the outside of the page (header, footer or sidebar).

If you see other links there for casinos, holidays, insurance or credit cards, then 99% of the time those links are being paid for by someone.

 

I agree. However, it's impossible for Google to do that manually.

 

internet is vast and they cant do that manually
even tracking all link sales on dp would be very difficult forget about net

 

Difficult to impliment, but with google's cash they can do anything tbh..
.
However, if you keep things private then there's nothing they can do.

Chuckun

 

There are so many millions of these deals running about, they're going to have a hard time. And besides, there is really no real way to confirm this because Google is not going admit this

 

so is payperpost going to be shut down ?

 

I wish it should not really happen.