Awhile back, when I first heard that Google was trying to aggressively clamp down on the lucrative link-selling industry, I had to ask myself… how can Google possibly know if I paid for that link or earned it the old-fashioned way?
Well after doing some research, I believe I finally have a handle on the concept. It involves something called graph theory. Now, I’m not a mathematician, but to boil it down graph theory is the mathematical structure in which objects - or in this case websites - are attached.
Try to imagine a map of the whole indexed internet; when you apply graph theory, each page would be a collection of data which would be linked or connected to another page of data. With a complete overview of the internet, you can see which page is linking to which page, what each page is about and when each link to and from it was put into place.
Now all a search engine has to do is identify a few sites which are known to buy or sell links and see who is linking to or from them. If a site is actively selling links, it wouldn’t be very difficult to simply filter any authority given to links leading away from the site and then examine the sites which were linked to it.
What we do know for certain is that Google and Yahoo had a manual method of doing this as early as the summer of 2005. Dan Theis reported seeing it in action during one of his training seminars, and an automated method for detecting paid links was expected by 2006. Thus, in all likelihood something is in place already.
How can you protect yourself?
- Don’t buy high authority links for a brand new site, wait until your site is more established. If your site is established with lots of content, etc., it won’t be as likely to trigger a red flag as a brand new site barely a month old suddenly having a PR8 link.
- Don’t buy links for sites on forums advertising links for sale, and don’t sell to sites who are trying to buy links via very public methods. After all, until computers can think like people, the only automatic way to detect a paid link is to discover someone actively buying or selling.
- If you absolutely need to buy a link, try approaching site owners directly. Not only will it likely be cheaper since there’s no middleman, but you cut out some of the risk by buying a link from a site that isn’t actively making itself a target.
- Try to keep the purchased links sensible, don’t buy them all at once or extremely authoritative ones.
- Try to get your links placed in such a way that they appear naturally; if you buy a link from a car parts review site, your link shouldn’t be in a section alongside a credit card info site. Also, beware links in the footer and keep a close eye on who else may be buying links from the site.
Good Profits.
