Google and Paid Links
Rebekah, who works with me here at Beers Design, sent me this email tonight with an excerpt from Matt Cutts’ blog. It’s about how people can report sites to Google that sell links on their pages. Here’s the except:
How to report paid links
April 14, 2007 @ 3:18 pm · Filed under Google/SEO
One thing I heard at SES London was that people wanted a way to report paid links specifically. I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I ’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing
algorithms. Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some point, but in the mean time, here’s a couple of ways that anyone can use to report paid links:
- Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you’ll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight. - Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.
As far as the details, it can be pretty short. Something like “Example.com is selling links; here’s a page on example.com that demonstrates that” or “www.shadyseo.com is buying links. You can see the paid links on www.example.com/path/page.html” is all you need to mention. That will be enough for Google to start testing out some new techniques we’ve got — thanks!
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This is unreal and I’m curious to see where this goes. Hopefully they won’t penalize for “paid links” but just not count them in your favor for ranking factors. Reason being, some people legitimately buy links for TRAFFIC not seo purposes and that is undesputably legit, even if google has a problem with people buying links for seo reason alone. Interesting…
I’ll be curious to see how this develops.