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- Sphinn It!
Went Hot: November 7, 2007 - 12:33 am
Posted By: Sebastian 304 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://sebastians-pamphlets.com)
Category: Google SEO
Google on the other hand looks at the whole crawlable Web. When they develop a paid link detection algo, they have a copy of the known universe to play with, as well as a complete history of each and every hyperlink crawled by Ms. Googlebot since 1998 or so.
Naturally, their statistical methods will catch massive artificial linkage first, but fine tuning the sensitivity of paid link sniffers respectively creating variants to cover different linking patterns is no big deal.
Of course there is always a way to hide a paid link, but nobody can hide millions of them.
26 Comments
Comments
Unfortunately, most folks aren't as smart as you and will fall prey to such sales pitches to their "likely" detriment.
Thanks Todd :) I figured Webmasters better should read Sphinn instead of particular forums ...
Oh, well - aren't we all only too aware of the fact that the minute something hits DP is toast, anyway?
As you know, I'm not as bullish as you are on the chances of paid links being weeded out algorithmically - except for the most simple, clueless kind. But that can easily be packed into the catch-all "artificial linking" category anyway.
Be that as it may, on sidenote your phrase "especially when found on unrelated sites" implies that Google actually applies a "theme" or "topic" label to any given site.
Now while I'm quite familiar with this myth, let me play the devil's advocate for a minute by asking you point blank: Do you actually have proof positive of that? Or is this merely another faint echo of the initial misconception (dating back to appr. '99) so prevalent in SEO circles regarding the "theme" bit in "theme vector"?
Nope Ralph, I don't believe in this myth. With "unrelated" I didn't mean topically related. I'll update the post and write "different owners/hosts" or so. Also, I think such a link network qualifies its output as kinda "primitive paid links".
As far as I can tell, TNX is already penalized on Google. I've looked at some of their crappy backlinks as well. Not someone I'd buy from. You're talking about buying links from a network of 1000+ sites, many of them on identical IPs. You're also talking about site wide links, randomly scattered across the network, though each website hosts dozens if not hundreds of paid links. More paid links per site, more problems.
Halfdeck, that's not a "TNX problem". Google has a detailed map of all larger link networks.
"Halfdeck, that's not a "TNX problem".
No. My point is TNX got themselves in a ditch using links from their own inventory. I wouldn't buy from that pool unless I was looking for short-term results.
Yup, their marketing sucks. How can they email bloggers like Donna and many others asking to publish their sales pitch? How can they feed their service with their very own paid links? That's not a long term strategy. As for short term results, I highly doubt that'll work with TNX links since their network is pretty transparent to Google, that means participating pages don't pass any link juice. You'd get some traffic, but no link love. Probably it's not even usable for sole indexing purposes.
"As for short term results, I highly doubt that'll work with TNX links since their network is pretty transparent to Google"
Well, for a week or two, they were ranking #1 for [text link ads] and other related terms. They're no longer ranking for those terms.
Their rankings are toast. I've just commented their downfall. I wouldn't have done that before Google has catched them, but I think warning Webmasters now is just fair. Esp. because TNX still believes in undetectable cheats.
Halfdeck, you just don't understand what you are talking about. Sites on identical IPs - lie. Sitewide links - lie. "They're no longer ranking for those terms" - lie.
Zonk - Your rankings today from where I sit:
[text link ads] ~80th
[text links] ~50th
[sell links] ~50th
[sell text links] ~80th
[buy links] ~50th
[buy text link ads] ~60th
[buy text links] ~50th
[buy and sell links] ~50th
[tnx] ~50th
Did I miss anything?
"sitewide links - lie"
http://www.tnx.net/?p=119574980
"You'll be able to sell links on every page of your website, instead of just the main page."
That sounds to me like sitewide links. Nah, YOU lie.
Shared IPS:
Let's make a little list:
gopinklady.com
wvsaf.com
warringtonhouse.org
lmpp.org
gdubz.com
amandacapper.com
statimic
gokidtested
temabench
topvoyance1
buckshothunters
clapc
cdtgb
wubskiwmusic
chinagreenful
planeticespokane
kl2fr
tragicbeauty
meadesreprise
curiousyellowmusic
hainanzeping
ldiproductions
hinesforsenate
fathmount
jchildneurol
gifthorsegourmet
pubenexclusivite207
superiorpacks
hundlyhillwalkingclub.org
cabr-bm
djmancub
luxauna
boutikeur
rocket-sfax
w3-integrated
calendargalaxy
groovulousglove
21storiesabroadwaytale
mykel.org
ndsalv-abra
planeticespokane
tjel.org
edemusic
icivannes
superlatees
amandacapper
woolfinceylon
eicanonlyimagine
promoteyourpixel
clartech
wingspanunlimited
jwe-law
get2007
gid0ze
danganh
soxharvest
supafrendz
armexdesign
fructusreti
bryggegruppa
agregation2006-2006
soho97
jtc-usa
vrnclub
fatheadtrivia
bicemiami
nobiva206
ccdhouston
nccucoastal.org
schema-tech
All of em on 70.87.197.86, with anchor text: [text link ads] (and that's just a partial list, I got tired of typing)
Zonk, I'm curious why you didn't include a link to
http://www.urlshouter.com/2007/10/08/a-new-way-to-buy-links
Zonk, Halfdeck -- edited some of your comments. Fight over the facts, fine. Don't get personal, and if someone gets personal to you -- don't respond with the same, call in a moderator.
"Don't get personal, and if someone gets personal to you -- don't respond with the same, call in a moderator."
Ok. My bad.
Halfdeck,
I can tell you again, we did not use our network to promote TNX - all sites that you listed are perhaps a crappy blog network from one of the offers on DP - we don't accept such sites to TNX - we accept only websites for humans.
The TNX thread which we promoted is #1 for term "text link ads" in Google and in top10 for "buy links", "sell links", etc.
And we have NEVER sold sitewide links - we sell links from individual pages to different advertisers, most advertisers buy 1 link on 1 page per site.
Sebastian, you have no facts, just doubts. We have 500 000 (half a million) pages in our network with Pagerank (recently updated) higher than 0 (up to 7). They pass a great link juice. Every day the power of our network only increases, as 150-200 new websites enter the Network.
Zonk, just because a page shows a toolbar PageRank that does not mean that all links respectively particular links pass PageRank. Google doesn't lower the toolbar PR for *all* pages selling PageRank.
"I can tell you again, we did not use our network to promote TNX"
http://sphinn.com/story/8736
"We haven't used even a 0.1% of our inventory to achieve this." There you impy you used your inventory to rank for [text link ads] and now you do a full 360.
"The TNX thread which we promoted is #1 for term "text link ads" in Google and in top10 for "buy links", "sell links", etc."
That's a DP thread, not a link on TNX. Of course it'll stay up even if Google decided to nuke TNX.
Fact remains if your linking tactic is bulletproof, TNX would be still #1 for [text link ads]. Do I want to take risks with one of my clients' sites by buying 10,000 TBPR0 links for $10, only to end up 50+ for every target key term, including the name of my clients' domains?
I don't think so.
It appears that zonk needs to brush up on the basics before handing out advice where he/she says, "Pagerank can be lowered automatically because of adding to the site several outbound sitewide links. Sitewide links drain lots of PageRank from every page. This may reduce your PR because more PR could have flown to your deep pages and then returned to your main page."
http://sphinn.com/story/9685#c13251
Utterly and totaly wrong. That sounds like a DP forum theory, PageRank leakage or some such non-sense.
With that said, I tend to take his/her advice on what sites or pages within their network are passing anything but no traffic with a grain of salt.
We are #1 for this term, even after Matt Cutts manually edited the SERPS as he did with TLA. He did it because we are a link broker, so if you client's site is a link broker, please don't buy links at TNX ))
Sebastian, Google can't detect most paid links - even human can't recognize that our links are paid in many cases - because we have 1 link on a page by default, webmaster can choose most relevant link to the content of the page, links stay there for months, there is a text in front and after the link and no footprints.
Johnweb, I'm sorry you don't understand that with every new outbound link from your page you give less link juice and pagerank to your internal pages.
"We are #1 for this term"
Dude, digitalpoint/linkworth is #1 for [text link ads], not TNX.
zonk, "I'm sorry you don't understand what PR is about."
You find one credible reference supporting the fact that PageRank has anything to do with what is on the page (other than google's recent reduction of link sellers). PageRank isn't removed by linking, you could have 1 or 10,000,000 links on a page and have the same PageRank which is only determined by the links to the page (or hand-jobs for the cheaters). The page with 10,000,000 links would only PASS 1/10,000,000 the link juice as the page with 1 link, but it surely wouldn't loose any.
As far as being #1 for [text link ads] you must be looking at a different google than anything I've seen because you are way down around 80th position. linkworth is at #1 and DP forums is #2.
Zonk, it plays absolutely no role whether there is one paid link per page or not, respectively whether an advertiser buys only one link per site or not, because even a pretty simple algo can identify the network's nodes. Also, you have greedy Webmasters putting up 4 links per page, as well as advertisers buying more than one link per site when those sites offer enough pages with an attractive toolbar PageRank.
Next, your ranking is based on two unreliable sources. Toolbar PR doesn't change when a page can't pass link juice any more (as long as Google doesn't express a lowered opinion via green pixels). Next your linkpop data pulled from Yahoo seems to count nofollow'ed links as well as links originating from your own network and other devalued or utterly useless links too. With this system you can prove nothing, you've even a fair amount of nodes bragging with useless figures gathered from your network's discounted links alone (linkpop numbers and toolbar PR gained from links which were nullified after Google compiled the snapshot for the recent TBPR update).
I guess your problem is that you can't see the big picture because you're not used to understand large scale systems. You could find even better ways to obfuscate the single link, that does not change the obvious link pattern you've produced on the Web, which is detectable with statistical methods.
PS: I know that you're planning to replace the PageRank factor in your scoring by another ranking method, but currently you're using it, and you're trying to argue with it, what is totally pointless.
JohnWeb, so you think that a page can't pass pagerank to internal pages?