Cloud Hosting Blog

The hype about “all mighty Google” never ends. Since April last year when Matt Cutts divulged how to report paid links the idea that Google actually can tell the difference between a genuine link and a paid link scares many webmasters and gives a new shape to text link advertising. So the question is: without these “reported links” does Google really know the difference between a genuine link and a paid link?

Yes and no.

The search spiders are somehow trained to identify links labeled as “sponsors” or “advertisements” as paid links. Leaving aside that links lost a lot of their SEO weight, the only reason why anyone should buy links on any site is traffic. Buying links for PageRank purposes is clearly against Google’s guidelines. If the advertisers buy links for traffic purposes, they shouldn’t be bothered by the rel=”Nofollow” attribute that tells the search engine that the site selling the link is not willing to pass PageRank and that the buyer is not a search engine spammer.

Also: Google, and any other search engine for that matter, is clearly able to identify links sold through brokers like Linkworth and TextLinkAds. Once we take these out of the equation (reported links, links labeled as sponsors and links sold through link brokers) there’s virtually no way Google can actually “tell.”

In the algorithms however (and algorithms are determined by humans) there are some considerations that might lead the search engine to believing that certain links on a site are paid. Site wide links are easily taken as “paid links” because they are to an extent unnatural. When site A links to site B from all its pages, the search engines will penalize both sites, unless the sites belong to the same company – and yes, the search engine can identify that based on server location, IP and other criteria. So if you know what is good for you, don’t sell site wide links.

Other issues that could be taken into consideration are link relevancy (why would you publish a link to a shoe store when your site is about web hosting?) and relevance of the nearby links. Also, if the link is not part of the main content of the page, the search engine could also consider it “paid”. Avoid any of the above techniques, as these “signals” could be misread by the search engine and applied to genuine links. You site could as well be penalized without being actually guilty.