Over years Google has grown rapidly as the most successful search engine and a very powerful company at that (darth vader comes to mind). And as many seo’s know, (unless you’ve been living in a cave, or have been cryogenically frozen for the past ten years), that when we’re talking about off page seo, links are the ultimate, dark force, which power all the websites organic listings all over Googles Internet.






Links are Googles greatest strength, but at the same time, their greatest weakness. And this is the reason why they are getting so pissed off. Even Matt Cutts cut all of his hair off to try and appear more threatening to webmasters in the hope they would not pay for links. I believe he is also taking nunchaku lessons too.

This leaves it open for webmasters to manipulate the search engine rankings – the easy way – by paying for links, rather than acquiring them naturally. But now Google are going to attempt to penalise the websites which belong to webmasters who are buying backlinks with this sneaky, ninja-like tactic, with the intent of artifically inflating the importance and rankings of their sites. Google have stated the cliché, many, many times, that buying links, is, against their quality guidelines.



Risk VS Reward

When you indulge in the fine art of buying links, you’d better be careful because there is a large element of risk. At one end of the risk-scale there is a humongous, shining pot of gold brimming at the top, with the beautiful golden, sparkling coins spilling over the edges. This side of the scale represents you in the future, at the time when you have bought so many links and have sucessfully inflated your sites rankings so much that you are maintaining a number one position for that high traffic, high converting term which you have dreamt of. Consequently you’ll have the flash car, the mansion, the suave ten thousand dollar suit, and the sexy babe to match. However, on the other end of the risk-scale there is a monstrous bucket of smelly shit which was recently excreted by the big wigs from Google after a big night out and a curry, and if you’re not careful your website will end up very, very deep in it. The point I am trying to make is that buying links really is a bit like walking a tightrope. If it is your site and you’re willing to get it burned, then the choice is yours. I wouldn’t, however, recommend buying links to anyone, but I’m going to cover some undisclosed ninja methods which you can use to stay as under the radar as possible.






Can a paid link be detected?

This depends if the link, and if the webpage the link is on shows its colours.

Google will look for clues. For example, if a link is in a column marked ’sponsors’ they can be pretty certain it has been paid for. Also sometimes link brokers publish the domains on which they place links. Some types of web sites, like school newspapers, have a reputation for selling links, and the search engines can simply, at a click of a button, stop those pages passing strength. They can do this with any sites.

I think that the best paid links are purchased directly from the domain owner and have no signs of payment. These can be aquired by personally contacting webmasters via phone or email, or purchased through specialist companies who hire link ninjas to seek you quality placements.

Google has a hard time detecting individual paid links, as Adam Lasnik pointed out, but if your overall link profile is weak, then its more likely for paid links to be detected OR for Google to mistake a good link for a paid link. Whether the buyer is paying for a link or a review is not something that can be detected algorithmically. This would need a hand review, which are sometimes triggered by too many links with the same anchor text, or anchor text that is not varied. So make sure you really vary it!

Links easy to detect are links sold by large ad firms where they place 20 on a single page. That group of links stands out from the rest of the page. Webmasters who don’t know any better, typically think they will get an instant boost from the search engines by buying the links, so they quit after a few months. The longer the link stays up, the more likely it is to be authentic, and the more likely it will benefit your ranks.



Paid for Reviews

If it’s the review that is paid for, then that link does not require a nofollow. For example, in Yahoo and Botw’s case, (two of the best ‘paid’ directorys to get listed in), according to Google you’re only paying for the revew, not the link. Which is the case because if you pay three hundred dollars for a review and you are rejected, that’s the three hundred down the drain. Oh well had better save up for next year.

Ifs

If you have a solid link profile with 90%+ of IBLs coming from organic sources, then Google is likely to mistake paid links as natural links.

If you create a decent article or tool and then buy links directly to that, it looks more organic to the search engines and makes it very hard to spot.

If you get discovered buying links, the sites selling the links linking to you will be devalued, and the other sites they are linking out to will probably also be devalued for the other sites buying their links … and probably the backlinks of these other link buyers have been checked, and some of the sites selling links to them may get devalued too… and so it goes on, and on, and on. You only have one life in this game and once you’re dead you get all your link love wiped out.

Any webmaster with top quality content would probably prefer to see their site and others ranked on on-page quality rather than off-page factors that can be manipulated.



Points to keep in mind:

a) Google isn’t watching your site.

b) You know more about buying links than Google knows about detecting them.

c) Some link buyers are savvy enough to get away with it. And some are not:

Coming from a webmaster who has had multiple sites punished for some unknown reason…
Google says buy our links, don’t buy others, don’t link to others without our special tag, don’t get involved with bad neighborhoods… which by the way we will never tell you what or where a bad neighborhood is. Write your pages for people and include content and we’ll stuff that content in the supplemental index. Join our webmaster tool program and spill your guts out to us over what you think you might have done to get penalized in our index, so we can collect all the goofy stuff that has been done in the past in to one big algo. All along, watch websites that engage in everything we say we don’t like beat the pants off of you in the serps.
Oh and lets put out blogs and forums that give incredibly vague answers on how to fix the local glass shops penalty… Yeah he’s a big time spammer, with his 10 pages of installation services and can’t show up on his company name or domain without begging and pleading with the google deities to list his site. Thats a real useful index… Can’t find the local craftsmen because they don’t know about Webmaster tools and pleading with google over something they didn’t do wrong.

Either way the choice is yours, so make it wisely.