I see a lot of people afraid of getting penalized by G for buying links. Buying links seems to be the only solution to get some visibility especially when you are new. Could someone explain to me how can Google detect paid links. By paid links I am refering to links from blog posts and not blogroll links. Thank you
People should not be afraid of buying links - they should be afraid of selling links! I rather doubt it will hurt you...
No they can't detect paid link. The only reason to hurt pr is when you buy link from unrelated website.
Gentlemen, I suggest you read through the blog of Matt Cutts. He is one of the main people at googles webspam division. Here are a couple of pages on his blog post that discuss paid links in depth - http://www.dullest.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/ http://www.dullest.com/blog/selling-links-that-pass-pagerank/ The google search bot looks for certain keywords around links. Such as "Sponsored Sites" - and then a list of links. The google bot looks for images around links where webmasters might use an image to describe links, instead of using text. Google will sometimes discredit those types of links. Google already has ways of detecting paid or bought links, and engineers are working on fine tuning the search engine so its going to get better. If your going to buy a link, it must not pass page rank. In other words, bought links should use the "nofollow" tag. This tells google that the link has been bought, or its not related to your sites content and the link should not pass page rank. Its ok to buy links, but bought links must not pass page rank. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736
Fine that is the is the easy part. When detecting a chunk of links they can assume that they are paid. They are not correct mind you but they can safely assume that.. But how can they ever get to know that a particular blog post was sponsored by someone (paid by someone) to get a link into it. How can they say if it was paid or not? Nobody knows... maybe it was a product review a geniune one. I think Google it is using its power to make people think they know everything - they don't. They are simply going with the proverb: "If you cannot convince them confuse them"
You are contradicting yourself. Google detects links algorithmically, and there's also a good deal of paid link reporting, which is used to again improve the algos. @kev: Thanks for the great post, it's been a while since I saw something as genuinely informative as that here at dp
On the face of it, it is not possible for google to ascertain whether the link is a paid one or not unless of course, the link is totally irrelevant to the site's theme or content and stands out prominently as odd one out! Regards, RightMan
google doesnot detect at all,you should have links or backlinks that are related to your niche or site or topic. do have links cz that is a key to success and have good rank!
some directories put their paid link crowd in a 'sponsored box' perhaps a 'featured listing' might rank too but overall i think the bot might have a hard time determining if a link is paid for if it's just another one on a page of a directory or blog page (and no flashing lights around it so to speak)
Actually they can detect paid link even if its not from TLA. Its when the site has "advertisement" right above your link that throws the flag. Also " must clicks" and words of that general nature will do that.
They can just run a search using their own search engine and those that post openly would be the first that get penalized.
they why is buying yahoo directory good, if you cant buy paid links? I figured they would penalize everyone on yahoo directory if thats the case? This whole buying links is very confusing to me.
You don't pay for a link in Yahoo directory, you don't pay to be included in it - you pay to be reviewed. If you get reviewed and they decide your site isn't good enough to be in the directory, you don't get your money back.
My understanding is that poor quality inbound links will never HARM your SERPs or PR. They just may not contribute any value. If google allowed poor links to hurt your SERPs or PR, then competitors would buy bad links and link them to your site. Back to your original question though, you want to be careful what you buy. If you're buying a link for the value it provides instead of the traffic, and google "sees" what you're doing, it won't pass value. Then it's money wasted.
Best not to link the sale or buy, may be temporarily did not find google. But I have sold the link, but was not found. I mainly sell PR links the same with site, or even higher than mine.Therefore, when the PR update, I did not punishment But for the sake of safety, Later, such as the link expired, I removed
The problem, in my opinion is that Google is doing a real mess over the internet trying to put the webmasters to do search engines job (identify natural links and SEO links), instead of doing it in the right way: identify the original sources of the knowledge and put the at the top of the search results.