Punished for using text link brokers?

Google engineers claimed recently their ability to distinct/detect paid links from standard links trades.

Think about it for a minute.. If you buy a high PR link to your low PR slots site from a high PR shoes portal or a high PR pets site or whatever niche that’s totaly unrelated to slots and gambling. I’m sure that Google engineers can program a module to detect such unrelated 1 way links.

The same goes for any company that sells text links…
The sites where the links will appear on will have quite many 1 way links per page.. and the links rotation will be relatively high… Especailly comparing to standard links exchange.

Moreover, Google can detect if your site suddenly gets 1500 1 way links at once. Therefor it can distinct sites pages that suddenly put 1 way links to many other sites at once and when those are removed.. they are removed at once.

All of you who monitor SEO forums know Google keeps many old caches for pages.. Google can easily trace pages with many 1 way links on them and a high links rotation.

Now comes the Big But

If you buy links from the Professor for or any other CAP member for example who is not selling many links like the sites affiliated with link selling companies:

1. Google can not detect high link rotation. There isn’t such.
2. Google can not detect 1500 links suddenly appeard to your site. There are just a few or a couple of dozens.
2. Google will detect there are many reciprocal links as well.
3. Google can’t tell the links are paid for.

If you are buying links, here’s my advice:

1. Avoid link selling companies, many cheap links at once might cost you long months of screwed ranking.. you’ll end up with no hair to pull from your head.

2. Buy as many links as you can afford but buy them in small amounts. Try to stay below a 100 links a month. Below 50 is even better.

3. NEVER Buy your links on anonymous sites. Buy them on relevant sites you have browsed and reviewed.

4. Don’t blindly chase high PR links, five quality PR3 – PR4 links can help your site more than one PR5 – PR6 link. SERP’s are not just about PR and Google is not the only SE around, many of my PR0, PR1 and PR2 pages rank way above PR4 to PR6 sites.. Sometimes quantity is better than quality. Remember, there’s a factor called Link Popularity which is not proven to be less important than the Page Rank factor.

5. Look for your links, if you see a site you like that don’t sell links.. contact the owner and ask for buying links. you’ll end up having stronger links to your site and maybe even cheaper.

6. Buy links for at least 6 months. Recently it looks like the PR is calculated for the way the link structure looked like 6 months before the current update.

7. Watch your site. Links are not magic replacement for quality and content. If your site can’t get SE traffic without links.. Are you sure the links are what you really need? Why not think again? There are many who never bought links and still doing very well.

8. Remeber, Google can detect links buyers just like it can detect the sellers. Make sure there are a few regular link trades on you site. Having only incoming links to your site can certainly be detectable and even Worst.. Harmful as the natural link structre of the internet dictates that every site should have both incoming and out going links.. PR sinks are easily detectable.

Most SEOs caution against dealing with paid links. As said above, I don’t think you would be penalized for buying them, but some in the industry think you will be one day. Kinda goes against Google’s public comments about other sites not being able to hurt you, but who knows with Google.

As for selling textlinks, I don’t see how using a broker would be any different than selling your links to another webmaster on this site. (Hint, with a 50% commission split, you would probably be better off just selling them here). You can be hurt if the site you decide to link to is banned by Google, so definitely check out the site before agreeing to link to it.

The visual PR doesn’t matter, real PR is in the background, and PR doesn’t much matter at all these days. As long as the page is cached in Google, you get some sort of credit for the link, yes, higher PR will likely be better, but not neccessarily (eg: A single link from a content rich .gov domain talking about online gambling with a PR0 is definitely better than being 1 of 100 links on a PR6 site about home loans).

I thought with PR0 for all the threads they wouldn’t make any difference or that there was a robots.txt file to keep old googlebot away (not sure why some forums do that).

Ah, yeah that’s a bit different.

It’s certainly true that if you were considered to be selling links, Google might penalise all the links on your pages. To what extent is up for debate, as indeed is the amount of paid-for links you’d have to carry before this happened. If it’s just one or two, I doubt they are going to do anything. And again, advertising banners cover most of the big sites on the net so obviously Google cannot do any kind of blanket penalty; either it needs to be able to work out which ones are paid for and just discount those, or else it will only apply the penalty in gross cases where (nearly) all of the links are paid-for.

In any case, given the secrecy offered by that the text broker site, you would assume that there is little chance of Google being able to identify a given link as paid-for, so long as it generally blends in with the site and thus can also pass a manual review.

Actually I was thinking of selling links there, but I think they take 50/50 cut… should have made that clear in the first post sorry.

Oh also the links in the signature here don’t count for anything SE-wise.

The thing to remember is that Google wont penalise you for doing this. Buying a text link won’t make you worse off than if you hadn’t bought it. That would be madness – every website that advertises anywhere would be screwed.

All Google will do is discount the value, so they have little or no effect on your ranking.

So if the reason you are buying the link is because you want a SE boost, then think twice.
If the reason you are buying the link is advertising for direct clicks, go right ahead