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- Sphinn It!
I was one of those people who looked down on buying links for a long time. It just seemed wrong - and surely the brain trust at Google would clamp down at some point. I just couldn’t believe that buying your way to the top of the organic results could A) be SO easy, or B) yield sustainable results. That was three years ago.
4 Comments
4 Comments
Comments
Very good research.
Lance, I spend a big part of each day disappointed with what I continue to find at Google: Formulaic doorway pages, bad grammar, keyword-stuffed pages, sites with spammy text...and yes, sites who clearly have purchased all of their link popularity. I do understand their dilemma...if you install too many active penalties, you’ll simply build a new industry around trying to get a competitor penalized. That said, I do wish they would place greater emphasis in quality on page content factors, and work to more actively ignore paid or spammy links.
Hiding links and keywords in NOSCRIPT is the new display:none; and white on white.
You’re jumping to conclusions. 1) URLs returned by a link: command doesn’t necessarily flow PageRank or anchor text. 2) Just because a million stat counter links point to a site only inflates a site’s PageRank; it doesn’t increase its relevance for "ink cartriges." Paid links work, no question about it - until they’re detected. Some may never be detected. Many are easy to detect. I personally recommend my clients to buy links but buy them carefully. Even if a paid link is embedded inside a blog post, if the buyer buys 100s of links using the same anchor text pointed to the same url and one of those paid links happen to be on a sidebar under "Sponsored Links" header, the entire batch of paid links are suspect.