WARNING! This week's video is pure evil! If you are faint of heart, easily disturbed, care for small children, terrified of slugs, curious about magnets, or fond of licorice, TURN BACK NOW!
This video provides actual evidence that the diabolical practice of buying links can actually work (and astoundingly well). It also says the practice can get you penalized back to the stone age, but hey, who needs to talk sense; there's controversy to be courted! So, without further ado (or any more exclamation points), let the heresy commence...
Did you avoid the temptation? Did you refuse to watch? Is the curiosity killing you? Okay, okay, I'll give you the lowdown, but you have to promise you'll nevereverever use this information for evil. Keep that halo sparkly, champ!
Here's the deal: Rand snuck out without telling any of us and bought some illicit paid links. They were anchor text optimized links from the same page on the same site to minimize the confounding factors. He got one link to each of three different sites...
Experiment 1
- Bought a link for a three word phrase with a Keyword Difficulty Score of 30%
- Directed it at an SEOmoz blog post with the term in the body, but not in the title tag
- Ranking before link purchase: #458
- Ranking after link purchase: #30
- Time elapsed: 8 days (all links were pulled as soon as changes were observed)
Experiment 2
- Bought a link for two word phrase with a Keyword Difficulty Score of 36%
- Directed at page on an established, but low-authority domain with term at end of the title tag
- Ranking before link purchase: #426
- Ranking after link purchase: #58
- Time elapsed: 4 days
Experiment 3
- Bought a link for a three word term with a Keyword Difficulty Score of 26%
- Directed at a page on a brand new site with less than 10 total links
- Ranking before link purchase: #198
- Ranking after link purchase: #4
- Time elapsed: 4 days
Holy crap, right?! That's some serious movin' and shakin' out of one little link! Here are a few things to note before we discuss why you shouldn't go smash open your piggy bank and spend your shiny coins on nefarious links: 1) As soon as the links were pulled, the rankings fell back down to where they were before the links, so if you're renting, don't get too comfy in that high position; 2) These were very short-term so there wasn't much time allowed for Google to sniff these links out; 3) This is not a statistically significant sample size or a scientific test, take these results as anecdotal.
Okay then, why shouldn't you buy links if they work such splendid voodoo on your rankings? Let's fight anecdotal "proof" with an anecdotal warning. Some friends of SEOmoz who run a fairly well-established site recently ran into a snag--they vanished from Google. They had ranked in the top two for many moons, raking in the lucrative spoils of their hard-won rankings. Then they got greedy; they thought a couple of paid links (four to be exact) could secure them the number one spot for all eternity. They wanted to be like the lone Highlander atop his mountain. They bought their links, and it worked for a minute. Then Google beheaded them (to continue the Highlander theme) by abso-friggin-lutely burying their site. Their links were discovered and now they can't even rank for their business name or their full title tags. Suffice to say, this has made business a tad difficult.
Listen, my fellow marketers, to this cautionary tale of penalty and woe. Paid links may reap quick and easy reward, but the repercussions can be dreadful. Besides, everyone knows that the Krampus comes for SEOs who pay for links.
Big thanks to Avi Wilensky of PRO Media Corp for collaboration with us on this study.
And now, a very special message...
This week's episode of Whiteboard Friday is a bittersweet installment for me. After producing this blog feature for over three years, and more than 150 episodes, this is my last. As Rand mentioned in the video, I've decided to bid farewell to the magical world of SEOmoz and pursue my next great adventure. I'm still weighing opportunities and haven't decided where I'll be heading next, but you can rest assured I'll still be playing in the online marketing sandbox, so bring your shovel and we can build a castle together. It'll be sweet; we can have towers and a moat...maybe a dragon. If you'd like to keep in touch, I'm easy to find on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
I want to thank everyone in the community for contributing to the truly wonderful experience I've had here, and all of the amazing people I've had the pleasure to meet online and off. I hope you've all enjoyed watching these videos and reading my posts as much as I've enjoyed making them. Most sincere thanks and gratitude to you all for an awesome experience over the last several years. Have fun and I'll see you around the interwebz!
Best,
Scott
I'd be interested for others to speak up on here and find out how many of us have done/do this (the link buy)..
I can think of a specifc site I worked on where the KWs were common terms with a geo tag and pretty competitive (even with a geo tag). Their competition for page 1 was the epa, wikipedia, and a couple of their local competitors that had been engaging in link exchanges that were clearly proving somewhat valueable (we all know that there are instances where this is true).
This wasn't an industry likely to gain a lot of momentum in the social space, because of the topic. Blanketing their link profile with backlinks from press releases and articles wasn't going to get the job done. They didn't want to wait on link baiting strategies so I hopped onto technorati, found relevant sites with decent metrics and bought a couple links.
They took over the #2 spot within 2wks and never looked back. This was about 8mos ago.
A well known link building specialist once told me that this is where the game is now for a lot of sites. It can be hard to rank the little guys that don't have brand recognition or a news worthy industry and find themselves facing stiff compeition for the promise land.
I don't lean on this as a common practice but sometimes, when done responsibly, it can help.
Here come the thumb downs ;)
"here come the thumb downs..." - not from me. Thumbs up from me.
I think the danger may even lie in approaching these webmasters though. What if they don't like what you are doing and report your tactics straight away themselves?
Nice points Mike. And apparently, 12 thumbs up later, no one has disagreed.
IMHO it boils down to this:
1)Links are necessary to achieve good rankings.
2)Google doesn't want the links to be purchased.
3)It's very possible to purchase links that will benefit your clients site that Google will never find out about.
4)It's remotely possible that Google can bury your site if it thinks you are being openly manipulative.
5)Before considering a link purchase, you have to balance the risk/return ratio the same as you would any other investment.
The risk/return ratio is a good point. A small site that's struggling to crack the top 10 for their key terms might deem it worthwhile since they are not getting much traffic to begin with. The potential for a huge penalty will probably deter sites that get a decent amount of traffic though as the downside is probably much greater than the upside.
Finally someone realistic!.. It is very hard to rank on competitive terms if you are a small business...
"Buying links" is way too vague. Any link on the internet could be bought, hypothetically. What makes it a "paid link" is what's around it, and more tendencies than just the fact that there was a money exchange.
Google isn't going to sense a Paypal or Credit Card transaction - they aren't omniscient. Because of this, buying links will always work, it's just whether or not the people that do it envelop it around other links that make the fact that it was paid obvious, and attributable to enough other common "spam" signals that establish it as a paid link.
What's more important is the semantics behind the word - what makes a "paid link" a "paid link"? How does Google establish this? Because the money has nothing to do with it - it's the many other factors that "paid" links often take on. Google will never eliminate paid links - but they will eliminate the common factors that create correlation between many of them.
I agree with your comment and that buying links will always because ultimately Google can't know whether a certain link has been paid or is the result of a meaingful cooperation.
Also there are always those links which have been setup "legally" and just look paid. Not everyone owning a good (niche)-website is in the paid-link business and sometimes a nice email to the owner is enough to get a link.
Google will get better to identify sites which sell links and just devalue those links. Also links which are not "relevant" will lose value but I am of course lacking proof here.
All in all a very interesting WBF video - the perfect linkbait ;-)
I completely agree with RossHudgens.
There are no details given about the context of the links and whether they were added to an old page or included in a new page on the linking domain. Nor was there enough time to see if the links would be caught eventually (understandably). Surely the point in a good paid link should be that it is indistinguishable from a regular link? In which case how would Google ever know?
As far as I can see this may as well have been a test to see if links improve your ranking...
I guess the only real way of testing would be to set up several domains and pay for different kinds of links for each of them - contextual links on new pages, contextuals added to old pages, footer links, banners etc. See how good Google really is at it... currently.
If you receive a complete ban for buying just four links, you've been buying *really* bad links. I mean even worse than both the '20,000 PR5+ links for $7,95' stuff you can buy on eBay and a public link purchase on Digitalpoint combined...
Are you guys 100% sure the paid links were the reason for the penalty?
Agreed, I'd be interested in the time frame as well. Did they place themselves around a bunch of other purchased links...like in a sponsored blogroll or something of that nature?
Agreed. That makes it FAR too easy to tank a competitor - just buy some spammy links on their behalf and voila, they drop out of the index? If that's really all that was going on, something's rotten in Denmark.
Totally agree Wiep. I am wondering why a site with SOLID #2 rankings for a very long time suddenly was "banned" for just 4 link buys. The site had to have a fairly mature backlink profile and domain. Plus sites that rank well (are trusted) tend to get away with more.
The 4 links must have been sitewide links and all of them obviously targeting the same exact anchor text and having all gone live at about the same time. I'm not sure one could leave a bigger/easier footprint for Google to find. That is one of the few ways I know of to get a site banned for paid linking.
There has to be more to that penalised site than just bought links. I thought that (generally) the sites selling the links were penalised, rather than the ones buying; otherwise it opens the door to a lot of abuse opportunities for rivals to get competitors penalised.
Even if all 4 links were from sites known to sell links and the links were all obviously bought, without knowing who bought them I find it hard to believe they'd be hit that hard.
I agree with wiep.net, are you guys sure that the site was penalized due to this paid links and not for some other reason seeing as the links you acquired were not exactly blatant?
1. There is no algorithm now or in the future that can detect a good paid link. Only a human can do this.
2. Paid links work extremely well.
3. For a lot of industries, it's very difficult to create link bait and viral content and when you see that the rest of the top 50 are buying their way to the top what do you do. Sit around and hope that one day Google finds a solution?
4. As the recession hits harder, webmasters are looking for ways to stay afloat. Selling links is seen as "easy money".
5. We all know that creating something of value is the best long term approach, but this isn't exactly cheap and takes a lot of man hours and brain cells. In a lot of cases, buying links provides a better ROI even if it is in the short to medium term.
I personally think Google shouldn't be so agressive with banning sites for buying links. It's a business owners right to buy links in order to promote their business. Who says that because you so happen to use well targeted and descriptive keyword anchor text that you are trying to manipulate the SERPS?
If Google thinks that a site is selling links in order to influence the SERPS then fair enough, prevent that site from passing pagerank. It's there right after all. The site that purchased the link will just see a drop in rankings. Is this not the fairest way?But hey. We don't really live in a "fair" world do we.8-(
Great post Rand. Really good topic for this weeks WBF.
3. For a lot of industries, it's very difficult to create link bait and viral content and when you see that the rest of the top 50 are buying their way to the top what do you do. Sit around and hope that one day Google finds a solution?
I have this problem. Our biggest competitor just keeps kicking our butts. We believe they're buying links in droves and have been doing this for a while...when will G finally catch on? And yes, what should we do? We don't want to just sit around, twidling our thumbs.
5. We all know that creating something of value is the best long term approach, but this isn't exactly cheap and takes a lot of man hours and brain cells. In a lot of cases, buying links provides a better ROI even if it is in the short to medium term.
We choose not to spend a ton of money employing tons of outsourced writers, SEO link-building firms, etc. But, that does mean a lot more work for me (the only one in my company who messes with link building stuff on a day-to-day basis). I've spent the majority of the last three or four weeks perfectly crafting guest-post link bait, and I'm going to be very disappointed if I don't get anywhere with it. :/
And making sure people know I am actually working to get links is a whole other issue because there aren't instantaneous results...I'm glad my boss realizes link building is a long, drawn-out, hard, and time-consuming task! :)
On of the way to avoid extra expenses is to somehow include the company in the efforts. For example, I got a couple of people to particiapate in blogs for 30 minutes per day, and the marketing guy is writing articles and I try to distribute through different media (not all for free by the way) But at least cost less money... That while you try to find some charities to give some products and get links back (charities are great), and buy a couple of real good links...
Yeh, same here. Are you SURE that the page was penalized due to the paid links. Historically, the advice I've read and my own experience has shown me that:
1) Paid links, when detected, are discounted, but the site is not penalized
2) The site selling the link often loses its toolbar PR
I seem to remember Matt Cutts even saying this. Because if you can get a site penalized by buying 4 links to it, we could just do that to our competitors sites.
I've seen a lot of comments stating that no algorithm will ever be able to differentiate between a quality paid link and an unpaid one. I don't think that's what Google's algorithm tries to do. In order to avoid penalizing webmasters unnecessarily, there has to be a tipping point in paid links. In other words, no single paid link, nor even a few paid links are (usually) enough to receive a penalty. However, if the ratio of "suspected" paid links to "natural" links begins to approach a certain level, it tips off the algorithm. So, a site with a healthy profile of backlinks can probably get away with buying a fair number of paid links, while a relatively new site that suddenly picks up a dozen "suspicious" links might have less leeway.
And feeding from this also is the trust rank theory ie. how close you are in terms of link 'hops' from a trusted seed site. The site with the healthy backlink profile is naturally going to be a bigger, more reputable brand, and will have links from all 4 corners of the web, but importantly, some of those links will likely be from other trusted sites. The new website will have low trust rank, and likely be (*) 5 or more 'hops' away from a trusted site, so are at greater risk of penalty
* Random number plucked from the sky! :-)
Oh the blasphemy! Rand bought links. Blind my eyes from reading any further!
What could be more unexpected? How about these future blog topics…
1. “The Meta Keyword Tag – Worth a Second Look”
2. “Hidden Text Using CSS – How SEOMoz Ranked #1 for Viagra”
3. “Why I uninstalled the SEOMoz Toolbar and now use PageRank as my #1 Metric” – By Rand Fishkin
(all tongue in cheek. great post)
The experiments you present are "interesting" but your conclusions are disingenuous at best. If the first three experiments are "not statistically significant" then why is the one last anecdote about one company's experience with one page considered a terrifying proof of Google's omniscient powers to find paid links and penalize the owners?
You surely must see the failure in your logic. Furthermore I would bet that you personally know people who have been buying and selling links for many years. In fact you had a link broker present at one of your paid conferences and you openly advocated the practice of selective link buying. The cognitive dissonance I am experiencing as a result of this video is making me question your motives.
Let’s be honest. Lets conduct real tests with throw-away sites or new sites then talk about the results. Lets do a statistically significant sample and leave the links up for an extended period of time.
I would be happy to volunteer a site of my own for the experiment and I would be happy to pay for links to it as a contributor. You have a community of 70,000 readers and subscribers who pay you millions per month. Can it really be that difficult to run a real test with, say, 100 sites, with 100 links, on sites that would remain completely anonymous?
The statistically significant truth is out there. It just takes the will and the courage to lead your community to conduct a test that may raise the ire of Google.
There is no reason to speculate, extrapolate, or alarm your readers with unsound data. Lets get it on! I will volunteer one of my sites. Who will join me in conducting the experiment?
Dave Foreman, Interactive Limited LLC
I think the last example is actually a crucial caveat - "let the buyer beware" in the truest sense of the words. If Rand puts out 3 anecdotes about how link-buying works and then doesn't warn about the consequences, that would be irresponsible, IMO. It may be true that 8/10 sites get away with link-buying (I'm making that number up), but for the 2 that don't, the damage can be irreparable. I venture to say most of us have seen it happen.
I believe it is the lack of solid reason here that deems each example noteworthy and very scary.
Personally, I could not find a statistical significance if I were holding the 95% in my left hand. But I do know a good ghost story and the very possible inconsistancies inherent in Google's webspam filters makes me nervous.
If I understand this great video, then you can buy links and point them to your rivals website, and in a few month get the rival out of Google.
Or what?
:-)
Almost.
You see, when you buy links for your competition they will out rank you for eternity. They will laugh at you and fart in your general direction.
The moment you buy 4 links for yourself, The Google will smite you with Thor's Hammer, Wonder Woman's bracelets and Aquaman's wet diaper. Then they will send you a placement badge for your business window that says, "Beware: Here be Douche Canoes"
My apologies... couldn't resist. But I'm right.
Paid links work well.
Bye, Scott.
Ok yep it works quickly but as some wonderful Viral Marketing CEO once told me its really just the honeymoon period at this boost may not be sustained.
It would have been interesting if you left these links in place for longer. Its likely that Google will react if you buy links and then remove them as many sites offer the ability to rent links by the week/month/year. If you new links vanish quickly its likely a flag to Google that you are going to have a quality team member visit your backlink profile....
And a final respect to @Scott for being awesome and part of the SEOmoz crew we respect, and have fun on the beach building sandcastles...
I agree that it would be an interesting extension to the experiment (purely for academic reasons!) to have left the paid link up longer for the new domain you set up to see how long it would take for Google to realise what was going on and issue a penalty.
I appreciate you don't want to "pollute the index" any more than is necessary but in the interests of online science I'd have liked to have seen those results.
I'm sure there are dozens of seo firms who have clients actively buying links on their on behalf, so its not really encouraging them but would be interesting to track.
Also do an experiment on can you buy more links to get yourself out of a penalty?
Link buying works forever for big brands, online casinos probably have 80%+ of their backlink profile consisting of paid links and they will always rank high because otherwise Google results would not be relevant.
Uhm. We bought links!? What is this world coming to?? Oh.. wait.. we removed them. ok cool.
Thanks for posting this and going behind our backs Rand. It makes for a very interesting WBF.
Scott, you've made me laugh, I think you made me cry once, it's just not going to be the same without you! I mean seriously... who's going to make fun of me now? Oh, yes, I still have Danny. :) See you for brunch soon!
Seconded - we're going to miss you Scott. Thanks for all the great years of helping SEOmoz achieve remarkable things.
Sorry Rand to somewhat hijack the threading on Scott - whom I have the utmost respect for and would also like to forward my best wishes as well, but:
I have for a long time been against the overly puritanical view on seomoz that link buying is evil. (something you may have noticed in my previous comments)
as an SEO in a very competitive industry (and having worked in casino/poker SEO for several years) acquiring links whether it be by buying, "encouraging", "incentivizing", or by building your own affiliate network that uses clean links (trust me, Ive done it all in the last 5-6 years), is the ONLY way to go to rank 1# to #3 for the big money terms (where every other result on the first page is PR5+ root domains or inner pages of something like wiki etc).
In my career as an SEO I have had no more than three penalties, all on inner pages. All were recouped within 2/3 weeks. (although not necessarily to the exact same URL).
The whole "build it and they will come" with 'it' being 'content' and 'they' being SERPs is just balls.
When you work in a competitive commercial environment and your success is measured on rankings and traffic, you learn and adapt to achieve your goals by any means possible. In this environment you need both the content, and a tonne of link equity.
Acquiring (by hook or crook) "legitimate" links on tightly related trusted, high quality sites is in my opinion totally acceptable - they wouldnt link to you at all unless you had a decent site if they themselves are high quality...You get the linkequity, they get some kind of payoff, everybody is happy.
Surely therefore the onus is not on link buyers, but on on high quality sites to only sell links to other high quality sites ;-)
I agree. And in keeping with nerdy SEO discussion; If SEOmoz were a character in an RPG game (and the game was SEO), you guys would definitley be the Paragons. Always erring on being 100% by the rules, even if it means hiding truths.
I'm sure its mostly to stay tight with Matt Cutts and other Google higher ups.
In my opinion there's no algorithim, no matter how good Google's engineers are that could tell a link is paid for if done right;
1: Linking site is niche relevant, does not have a linking page or any "paid link" area's on the footer or side of the site.
2: Your link is imbedded in relevant content, not on a blog post, or blog roll, or footer.
2: No where near the link (or the entire web site) is "paid text link" or anything else that suggests it was sponsored.
3: The site owner linking to you is strict about who they link to and only linking to relevant niche sites like yours in an SEO friendly way.
How could Googe possibly determine that was a paid link, even if someone directly looked at the page?
Martin - I think you mistake my position of practicality for one of puritanism. I don't think buying links is "evil," I think it's not worth the risk and a poor use of funds when there are so many ways to buy links without "buying links."
I'm just a huge fan of rejecting convention in favor of creativity, and from my experience, I'd say it's a powerful competitive advantage.
Agreed. IMO buying links doesn't need to be viewed ad Good vs Evil. Perhaps Risk vs Reward is a better way for each to evaluate the topic for their own short and long term goals.
And please understand, I wrote the post with my tongue planted firmly in cheek.
OK I don't believe for one second I'm the first person to have thought what I am about to suggest and yet I've never seen anyone actually write it down.
Given buying "bad" links can destroy your rankings - dramatically - why not buy rubbish links for sites you compete with?
Get them "removed" leaving the way for you to climb to the top.
How would you make that argument to Google "it wasn't me guv honest someone must have done it to me to get me banned".
It almost makes me believe they can't penalise you for buying links but just ignore them.
There are enough immoral people that someone must be doing this.
(having removed the pin he retires to a safe distance).
That is exactly the explanation a SEO expert told me about the risks of buying links. First, there is no way to know if it is paid, and second if it was that easy, people would do it for their competitors.
That is exactly the explanation a SEO expert told me about the risks of buying links. First, there is no way to know if it is paid, and second if it was that easy, people would do it for their competitors.
Which is one of the many reasons we'll miss you buddy. Your brand of humour has really brightened up my Fridays and you will really be missed Scott.
I've no doubt at all that whatever you do next, you'll succeed wildly. I just hope that whatever it is, it includes writing posts so I don't have to say goodbye to your wit.
Scott I assure you that even if you don't work actively with SEOMOZ but you won't be able to resist from participating in discussions. Its an addiction.
Good luck for your future aspirations.
The reason many people feel link buying is bad is that it means you can buy your way to the top. OK in the off-line world having deep pockets always results in some people having a massive head-start over the rest of us. But people kinda hoped that the internet would be a level playing field and the person just starting out had as much of a shot as anyone else. No-one is looking for utopia, just a reasonable chance of competing.
When a site jumps 198 spots in a relatively competitive kw niche it's probable that Google's algorithm flags it for review. If the links appeared to be natural, and high PR site links were done over time it might come across as a lot more legit. Risk vs Reward... I'd rather do the content etc myself it takes a lot more skill.
How does Google know!
How does it know!
Tell me!
Where else can small websites turn after everything else onsite has been done. They do not have the resources to provide quality changing content. They are playing in bands, selling furniture, designing buildings. They can just about afford to have someone add a few links once a month in the vague hope they will rise a few places.
Love the article interesting, informative, controversial
Totally confusing!
Love it
If you have the resources to pay someone to "add a few links once a month" you'd be better off spending those dollars in creating interesting unique content.
I wonder if you could set up a blank website and create a segment called "Paid Links" and have the content of that segment be links to your competitors if it would penalize them into obscurity - and in turn put your site into the #1 spot. I think someone should try testing that out.
great whiteboard, do you have a tool to check if a domain has been penalised?
that would be a wonderful tool!
I think first we should define paid links. Except the fact that they are paid for and they do not have a "paid" tag, how are they different from the natural links? They can be in the content, sidebars or footers like any other natural link. Also, natural links are often on exact keywords.
Let's say I have a website about blue tomatoes. I want to rank for "blue tomatoes" so I craft some kick ass content on the homepage and then let the world enjoy it. A gardening blogger loves my website and talks about my tomatoes in a new post, linking to me with "blue tomatoes".
Now let's say my competitor who also is in the blue tomatoes business has a very similar website homepage and wants to rank better than me. He buys a link from a high authority gardening blogger - like the previous case, this one links to him with "blue tomatoes" from his newest blog post. He doesn't tag the link or post "hey, paid link here!!11".
How exactly can anyone in this world create an algorithm that would decide that his link is paid and mine isn't?
Also, are paid directories evil too? You can have adorable anchor text for your website title(other than your business name) in many of them.
I'd say a lot of pattern matching from brilliant, well paid, dedicated computer engineers can accomplish a surprising amount. I'm still shocked at the quality and relevance of results Google produces for many strange and difficult queries. If they can sort through tens of billions of webpages and built machine clusters that can crawl, index and rank the web in a few hours, I'm not sure paid link detection is fully beyond their capabilities.
What about the idea that anyone can buy links and have them pointed to your site??? A fairly easy way to oust the competition. How can Google penalize you when you did nothing wrong?
Because of this Google simply has to find it hard to penalize the site getting the link. And this is backed by the fact that 99% of all paid link penalties are put on the site giving the link and not the site paying for or getting the link. The worst that happens, 99% of the time, to a site buying links is that the links are devalued and you end up paying for links that are no longer passing juice.
Another thing is that linking is the foundation of Google's algo, it is what set them apart from the competition back in the day and it will always be the most impactful metric. I do not see a way for them to get around this. Engagement stats like CTR, time on site, etc are just too easy to game and if they were weighted too heavily then porn sites would rule the world!
"99% of all paid link penalties are put on the site giving the link and not the site paying for or getting the link"
And yet Scott/Rand report that an SEO company website was buried after Google appeared to identify that they had bought links.
It would be useful to know the make-up of those 4 paid links - the trust rank of the sites, the relevancy of the linking sites to the penalised site, whether the links were exclusive to the penalised site and where on the page they were placed, whether any other black/grey hat SEO was undertaken by the same company, etc etc. I guess in the circumstances that's not an easy ask, but it would add 100% to the quality of this (otherwise interesting) post.
No algorithm can detect if a link has been paid for.
For one search term (blue tomatoes) your competitor could buy a link and get away with it but if he’s buying links across all of his major terms then there’s a higher chance that his link profile is going to include a known link broker - and that's when he gets into trouble.
Scott, I am going to miss your Whiteboard Fridays! At this point, I must again remind you of that fateful afternoon in late 2006 when you and I became real friends:
"I wasn't rich like you guys. I didn't eat gold or have a flying pony."
:)
There have been very few times in my life where I've laughed as hard as I did that day (my third day at SEOmoz, I believe) geeking out with you.
Ah, memories FTW.
Do we have any clue on how Google identify those paid links? That would be the very interesting part of the "paid link" subject.
I would be interested in more details / facts about the penalized page example you gave:
- Was the website already ranking well for the search expression it bought paid links for?
- Did the website already have a fairly big amount of backlinks with the same anchor text?
- Are the source websites (where the backlinks come from) talking about the same subject in other pages?
- Are the buyed links the strongest backlinks to the page?
- What about the ratio # of backlinks to the buying website's home page, vs. the # of backlinks to the page that got penalized?
- Are we sure it got penalized for having bought links?
Very great WBF by the way. And wish the best to Scott!
Personally, I believe that paid links should be avoided but...
At some point in our SEO lives, we will all be tempted to buy links. The Dark Side is seductive and I am sure most of us will succumb and give it a shot.
I think the whole argument hinges on what sort of link you are buying. Buying from an obviously spammy sort of site is just a poor idea. On the other hand, paying a relevant, quality site to link to your relevant, quality site falls in something of a gray area. Does it really pollute the index or qualify as spam if you use money as an incentive for a decent link (take the tomato example from icanhazseo's comment)? I would say no.
You're leaving?! Who's going to laugh at my jokes? Who's going to leave replies like "BEST. COMMENT. EVER."? Who's going to pay my bar tab at Pubcon? *sniff*
Seriously, we'll miss you, buddy. Don't stray to far from the search world, ok?
Hmmm...SEOMoz's links were all for non-competitive terms. Presumably the example site bought some valuable terms in the anchors it paid for.
Since one of the links bought was for a low value (new) domain it'd have been interesting to see how long (if ever) it took for Google to pick this up. If we assume Google is sniffing them out algorithmically, it might be fair to assume they are looking for valuable anchor text.
If I was to do an experiment, I'd go for something from the gambling/porn/pharmaceutical that was highly competitive. It doesn't matter what position you get to, just how much impact it has (a jump from 400 to 100). In fact, not making page 1 or 2 will likely exclude the likelyhood of the link being reported so you can be surer if you've been spotted algorithmically.
If I were a betting man, I'd suggest that of G is weeding them out algorithmically, it's only likely to be checking high volume competitive keywords & phrases.
Scott: good luck in whatever you do next. Stay in touch and let us know. There is haggis and whisky here for you any time!
Thank you for everything you've done for us along the way. Any time I can do anything for you, all you need to do is drop me a line.
For cryin' out loud Will, promising him a dish containing sheep's heart, liver and lungs...are you trying to scare him away from the British Isles forever?
We have shared memorable dinners that involved all of these ingredients and more with a bunch of the 'moz crew. Scott is wise to the way of the haggis (though perhaps not the ingredients, perhaps best to keep quiet about that).
That must be why the whiskey comes into the picture ;)
If someone were to purchase a link on the Scottish Tourism Board website would that make it a 'plaid' link?
For our transatlantic friends, that's an SEO/tartan mashup joke.
Sorry.
Sorry to see you leave Scott. I recently met you for the first time at SMX Advanced Seattle, and I found you to be a very smart and engaing SEOmoz representative. You knew your stuff, and you presented it in a very approachable fashion... I know you will be missed at SEOmoz.
Andy :-)
I dont understand.
There are multiple times SEOmoz refer to paid links as a good link building practise (they say it indirectly).
Referring to the Professionals Guide to link building found at https://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professionals-guide-to-link-building#Section2B
These are some points:
1. How Search Engine Evaluate Links:
There is trust and relevance but there isn't PAID. You can still have a trustworthy, relevant paid link by many means. Sure if you pay for a link on a PR0 site that isnt related at all, that's stupid
2. Asking for a link
Sometimes asking for a link requires a fee, sometimes a simple payment for a link is the only way your link will be accepted. And what is the difference if you pay for this link or not? the process will still be the same?
Rand,
I''ve been reading your blog on a regular basis and this is going to be my first comment on your blog. But I'm going to disagree with you and I'll explain why.
I'm working on a site in very competitive niche(big industry), doing all the right things and following the rules. When analyzing competitor links(anchor text), I found out that most of their "good" links are paid. These links come from authority sites such as newspapers, consumer info and etc. We're not talking about one or two links here, we are talking about hundreds.
So, how do I know that those links are paid? It's simple, because next to their links is another link "get listed", "advertise" "list your company" and the page clearly tells you that you have to pay in order to get there. And it's not cheap.
They had these links for a long time(years), these sites rock the industry. This is why I don't believe that buying links is a bad idea.
Rand, I didn't mention any buying/selling sites, but if you want to see them I'll be happy to share them with you.
Regards
Of all the things said in this Pandora's box of a blog post, my favorite parts were the shout-outs to Scott (Thank you!) and the person selling links. Both Scott and the link seller: classic.
I like to think of paid links in the same way I think about trick plays in American football.
It's very rare that a football team runs the flea flicker because of the extremely high risk associated with it. It's hard to run and, if detected, almost assures the defense (Google) of sacking (penalty) the quarterback (your site). That being said, when it works, the offense is almost assured of a huge gain (front page here we come!).
It would be interesting to run some tests in an attempt to ferret out what triggers penalties for so-called 'paid links'.
Interesting stuff for sure. At the end Rand alludes to the boogeyman and talks about an aged site that bought links and disappeared into oblivion.
If it were that easy to get penalized with a few paid links, there would be a lot more Google Bowling going on (buying links pointed at your competition to get them banned). That's not the case. Not even close. (i have reviewed hundreds of paid link buy campaigns just in the last several months)
Speaking of bowling, thanks for the great bowling party a few weeks ago SEO Moz. Good times!
I too struggle to understand how Google knows these are paid links? Did they buy them on text link ads?
I got a link just a few days ago from a blogging friend, in the blogroll with sound anchor text, looks just like a paid link but no money passed hands, could I be penalised for this? My feeling is no, at the worse it could lose value but a penalty would be crazy.
I think if a link looks paid there is a good chance it will be devalued whether money has passed hands or not. The only reason could directly penalise a site for buying links is if they had insider knowledge, they bought them from text link ads or were stupid enough to send a "can I buy link" email to the worng person.
Great WBF,
Thanks Scott for all the WBF,
I will miss the humour as it became a tradition on Friday morning (I am based in UK) to read the posts for a good mood and even higher enthusiasm levels.
Okay. Good experiment, and very interesting results.
Whats people's views on using a few directories in the mix?
What about charity links. You "sponsor" an event, thats a paid link right.
Its a bit hazzy on the borders.
Cheers Mozzers.
Al
You will be missed Scott! Just when we were loving the great summaries on the WBF, now it's gone!! :(
In regards to the post! Well... I haven't been around for long so I've never bought links before and I've never worked with an overly competitive KW before. I'm pretty sure when the going gets tough, the tough will get going and do what they have to do, myself inclusive!
I read on the Google website just last week that you cannot get penalized for off page happenings since we have no control over it.
If Google did penalize websites for off page things I would buy a ton of links for the people that rank above me and report them.
I'm not an advocate for buying links but to play devils advocate, whats to stop someone from spending some $$$ on some links pointing to their competitors website? It could be pretty easy to buy a bunch and set them up in an extremely spammy way... in theory Google bans this competitor website. Seems wrong to me, there has to be more to this than we know about.
it does work, but only in relation to the total amount of links that a website already has.
for instance, your competitor has links from 100 FQD's - you buy links from 1,000 spam sites.
your competitor is nuked.
however, lets say your competitor is wikipedia, you would need about 100 billion spam links to nuke them. even they they have so much aged domain authority it wouldnt happen anyway, but its just an example.
There is a time in everybody's life when we all will realize all of our mistakes. I heard a quote in my childhood like "I have teachers so all of my faults are not mine"
What about directories? For example, Yahoo and Business.com? They are different then paid links where its human driven.
It looks like buying links works in non-competitive areas. I have a friend that is a midwife and she has 2 competitors that rank really well. When I took a look both sites, they had very suspicious links... hundreds of them going back about a year.
This is one of the sites:
https://www.mobilemidwifery.com/
And just a few samples of the links:
https://computergeardirect.com/1133/computers/the-major-goals-of-using-a-midwife/
https://nextgenerationtraffic.com/?p=1145
https://lawyersofmelbourne.com.au/is-homebirthing-safe/
I reported both sites 6 months ago but nothing. But midwife stuff doesn't get a whole lot of traffic.
On the other hand, I know buying links doesn't work in competitive areas. I work in the automotive industry and Google catches obvious use of text links within a few months. After I report it, the site usually goes back to ranking where they used to be. However, they never seem to get banned or penalized.
I have a friend who works at a gambling site and he told me that Google penalizes and bans like crazy for gambling sites that engage in black hat seo.
So there must be some popularity factor or maybe certain categories of sites that trigger Google's black-hat meter. The severity of the penalty also appears to be different depending on what industry the site is in.
I think Google won't ban or penalized site if they not sure that it was them who buy the link... It could be competitor such as your friend site that bought the link and link to the site and you report it. (just example)
The only possible thing Google can do is to reduce or null the rage rank juice that pass from the buyed link.
Fascinating and dangerous bit of research here.
Seems it would also be worth knowing more about the nature of the links you bought, because as others have mentioned, sometimes a paid link looks blatant and sometimes it does not.
I'd also be interested in a followup to know if/how the rankings fell again after you took the paid link down?
Acknowledging the risks, I have to wonder what the long-term impacts of a short-term boost from a well crafted paid link might be. If you buy a link which boosts you into the top 5, then take it down a week later, what's the impact of that week in the top 5 on the natural link profile? Would that garner an influx of natural links as well, which might then in turn support generally higher rankings than before?
I think Rand said when they removed the paid links, the pages went back to their original rankins.
*facepalm*
Yes, you are right - and it's there in the writeup too... "As soon as the links were pulled, the rankings fell back down to where they were before the links"
Interesting post. I personally go with the belief that you should avoid paid links, but I do agree that not all paid links will always be found. I however, would rather not risk being one of the sites that are found. There are many ways to generate links without paying for them.
At any rate, as long as links remain a factor in SEO, there will always be paid links and there will always be someone offering a way around it. I don't see Google devaluing links in their algorithm anytime soon, so I don't see paid link brokers going away soon either.
I do not agree with the penalty phase of this and we have done extensive testing.
First, we sell links off of our sites. We have over 20 that have a PR rating of greater than 5. We sell via a broker as well as direct. This accounts for substantial revenue and most are repeat clients. If they were getting slapped soley for this - they would not be repeat clients.
We also put our links on the same sites and others we do not sell links from and have increased our own rankings for those sites. How would the Big G know where, why and how those links are on my sites (unless I was running some sort of script on the sites they could detect).
As someone pointed out earlier, if this got you google slapped I would start buying links for my competition and in a month I would be the only site rated for any keywords. So I do not want to know where you guys bought your links - I want to know where the guys who got de-listed bought their links.. :-)
Yes, I believe even Matt Cutts did mention something about this as well.
It doesn't really make sense to get penalised for buying paid links because if that was true, I too would go out and buy tons of dodgy paid links and shoot down my competitors.
I believe Matt Cutts mentioned that the penalty is towards the link sellers which makes sense. This would then discourage (hopefully) publishers who have invested heavily (time & resource) into their own sites, creating authority, content, trust and relevancy to not sell links on their sites with the fear of them getting banned from Google.
The demand will always be there but the clamp down should be on the sellers. Think of it from a perspective of drug buyers and drug sellers. Why is it that drug dealers received a harsher penalties compared to drug users?
Because if there aren't any drug dealers around, there's no one to buy it from. Same with link buying, if publishers are reluctant to "sell links" on their site with the fear of getting banned, publishers & advertisers may then resort to white hat link buying tactics instead which usually promotes quality.
Hi Rand, hi girls and guyz
would be really interesting see how many money are going around in linkbuying...
This is only a topic I've read about, but I thought that the it was assumed that *a link could never negatively impact your site*, but it's possible for a *search engine to discount or even ignore a link* if it appears to be a purchased link (maybe “reasonable surfer” could take affect here too). At a minimum a nefarious site would be wasting money on a link that's giving them no juice.
So, is that not true—could some bad links nuke your site’s rankings? Doesn’t this mean that I could make a shady site that kidnaps other site’s rankings (with nefarious links) and holds them ransom (only taking the links down when they pay me money or something)? Seems like something that shouldn’t be able to happen…
thanks Scott & Rand for a great WBF....topically, I 'd have to agree too!
our clients pay us to not only SEO their sites, but to know enough to manage their RISK too...
it's that risk management that truly earns us renewals we believe and that can only be achieved by being cautious, patient and in all respects, risk-concious for them all...
;-)
Jim
I didnt read through all the responses, so this may have been covered... but how does it make any sense for Google to bury a site it believes has purchased links?
Does that mean I can bury my competitors by spending a few hundred dollars to buy links on their behalf? It would be much cheaper (and easier) to do that until my sites are left standing alone.
Honestly, its impossible to control who links to you.. why would Google punish for that? I call BS.
I agree, it would all just be too simple. Spend $100 on a few thousand spam blog comments and bye-bye competition. Plus I always run across websites ranking in the top three spots in numerous niches with a backlink profile full of obvious paid links. And like I said above, big brands were, are and always will be protected againt any paid link penalties because it would make Google's results less relevant.
Isn't there a difference between a paid text link and hiring someone to spam blogs though? The actual comment on a blog is free, it's just spammy.
I guess, you are right that is not a perfect example. But you can still go to the forums and buy low quality links for .50 each, so spend a hundred or two hundred or a thousand (if knocking off your competitor is worth it) and get your competitor knocked off.
In the end as many others have stated Google can never really know for sure if a link is paid for, so if the backlink profile of a site is starting to look like low quality spammy links it should be easy to get a penalty activated.
In many cases though, isn't the point of buying paid links (which I've never done, in part because I'm a novice and don't have the experience to take that risk wisely) is that you buy them from decent, authority sites. Like a mag similar to Wired as in Rand's example. That is pretty manipulative. I don't know that Google hates spam because it's paid, more that the quality of spam regardless is bad. If you're going to spend money on directories Google already doesn't care about, what do they care if you're paying to do so or not?
And Yahoo, JoeAnt, plenty of other directories...it's clear on the sites you have to pay, but Google doesn't penalize you for joining.
Avi here, Rand's co-conspirator in this experiment, joining the discussion.
I’d like to clear up some of the confusion in the comments, answer some questions, and share my thoughts.
My hypothesis was consistent with Rand's. My assumption was that Google could easily algorithmically detect sidebar clusters of text link ads and simply ignore their existence, stripping their ability to pass authority. A typical ad link cluster might read "cheap auto insurance", "wedding photography", "free mortgage calculator" and "iphone accessories", with all the links pointing to different top level domains. The web is filled with these clusters, decorating millions of sidebars and filling many white spaces. That's exactly where these paid links were placed, and they worked all three times. I think we dispelled a popular myth - that these common link clusters are easily sniffed out algorithmically, which is simply not the case.
I think overall, this simple experiment yielded a few clear take-aways:
1) It can take under a weak for any domain - new or old - to rank for a given keyword - with just a single text link ad.
2) A PR6 link to a PR0 brand new domain did not raise any red flags or trip any filters.
3) Sidebar link clusters with irrelevant surrouding links and content still pass citation.
4) The lack of clicks on the link did not seem to matter - (I don't believe SEOMoz recieved more than a few unique visits from the link - Rand - jump in if I'm wrong.)
That's my take from with this small test. Looking forward to your comments :)
Buying link is like smoking weed... you be fine as long as long you don't get too high and addicted to it.
Too high as too high in the search engine which lead to competitor envy which lead to competitor looking at your backlink which lead to competitor reporting your ass to Google.
Too addicted as in you can't do any white hat link anymore so you can only buy and buy.
Fantastic experiment Rand. Links buying has always been something of interest to me as we see alot of competitors doing for all sorts of clients but our moral standards remain 'whitehat' and I think longterm it pays off. Yeah its a hard road sometimes but at least when you get there its for the 'greater good'.
We were approached a while back regarding buying top phrase links form old news articles and after reading this i'm glad we kept our wallets closed.
Thanks
You said 'moral standards' keep you white hat. I admire your purpose and in no way doubt your sincerity, but it is interresting to see how Google has shaped our "morality."
Google wants us to think it's immoral to buy links, and perhaps it is on some level of transpanency. But I never want to confuse authority with morality. Buying links is seen by some as a simple and effective business/marketing tactic. Just like it's in Google's best interest that webmasters don't buy links.
Sometimes we see black hatters as evil cheaters and white hats as the good guys - but by who's standards? Google has a tremendous amount of power to make the rules that we all play by. Personally, I don't want them also dictating what I'm supposed to feel guilty about.
Is this still working?
Hey Rand,
I totally agree with your caution about the risks of link buying, and I've seen similar results from limited purchases.
HOWEVER, I really, really doubt that the folks in your cautionary tale were penalized for buying 4 links. That seems sooo unlikely. If it were true, any SEO could sabotage competitors with just a few links.
Unless they bought links on 4 of the biggest spam networks out there, I don't know how this would lead to the death penalty.
And, even if they WERE on 4 spam networks, how did Google suss out intent?
The only thing I can think of is that these guys were known to play with link buying, and got caught red-handed purchasing the links.
My gut tells me something else must've caused the penalty: Cloaking, something. Otherwise, I'm going to go start up some cheesy affiliate sites and use the proceeds to buy myself a Fisker Karma :)
Ian
I suspect you're correct, Ian. Those four links appeared to be the only cause of penalizing that particular page, but the link profile of the site overall (and the lack of other external links pointing to that URL) likely had some impact here.
Thanks a lot Rand,
Before watching this video, and even till half way through i was actually considering buying links, but now you've scared the hell outta me man ! I'm never going that path now. :P
Very pro!
I thought I was pro.
But I did learn from u.
Thank you!
Scott, very sorry to see you go!
Although the article is abit old, it still is a great read.
There is no clear line that separates black and white hat although Google has a list of methods they disapprove. This isn't an appalling practice, but the possible adverse repercussions of link buying overshadow the rewards.
[link removed]
I know this post was made 4 years ago, here's an update on what Matt Cutts has to say about paid links in Mar 2014:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zupIbMyMfBI
I'm not a fan of buying links but there are some occasions where you have to buy a link or two to stay in the game. I think for some clients it can be a necessity.
It's a risk any-day. I suggest not to fall into the dark path !
Sounds like Rand has taken the statsistical correlation criticism from 'that' blog post and comments left on sphinn pretty hard. Couldn't help but notice 'this is statistically insignificant, I wouldn't publish a paper on this' etc.
Wow, all that movement for one little link, but whoa what a penalty, not worth the risk. I don't see the video on here. Is it still around somewhere?
So when you say you bought links... Did you actually pay for them on a site that sells links or did you pretend to buy links from a site that is reputable and has no link selling history?
Dear SEOMOz
Sorry if this is an infantile question but I am new to this SEO malarky.
I would like to ask if you consider a paid entry in an online directory as a 'paid link' and hence something to be avoided?
Looking forward to your views on this.
Best Regards
I purchased a link here and there but always got rid of them. 3 years later majority of my long term clients are in the top three. We simply used the SEOmoz metrics to identify good vs. bad and it has not let us down. We have never received a penalty across all of our clients. Zero panda issues. Zero webmaster tool warnings. Lovely.
We did spend money on Human Edited Directories and additional content.
This is for the legal, home, industrial industries. I'm sure in high competition industries it might be hard with just directories.
Hi Guys,
A bit more info on this. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. We are a relatively young company with kids products. 90+ % of our links are from mom type bloggs. In each blog we have links within editorial content (reviews) and on 20 or so blogs we also have sidebar links and or 125 x 125 buttons with a link.
The more I read the more I think I would have a link profile that looks like I could be buying links. I am not doing that though. What happens is the bloggers simply like the product. I even have a customer who bought from us and happened to have a prominent blog...and put a link to us in the sidebar.
Do I need to do anything about this link profile or should I just keep building? Let me know your guidance folks.
Thanks,
many webmaster are buyin link and have good rankink without any penalty
I outsource my company's SEO campaign. i'm not sure if most of the links that they get are paid links? Do you have any advice ono how i can tell from it?
How can i tell them to stop using those paid links ?
Wait, what? Scott's last post and WBF was on paid links? Way to go out with a You-Know-What!
Take care Scott! See you in the online world! :)
Looking for your take on something folks. I work with bloggers a lot and often ask for sidebar links. I do not buy links though. Am I at risk if I have links in sidebars on maybe 20 blogs? I dont want to get shutdown when I have not done anything wrong. Let me know your thoughts on this side of the link "aquisition" discussion.
Thanks,
@shirtsthatgo-First of all, I would say that you need to realize that in the blogging community, blogroll links are very common. The search engines realize that, and I doubt they will think much of it. That said, however, I would suggest you work on building a more diverse link profile. Blogroll links are not worth a lot, anyway. But you may find that by building a better link profile, you'll be able to unlock a little more value in them. Concentrating on nearly all blog links or forum links will offer you very little, IMO.
Hi Doc,
Agreed. We are a young business and are in the initial seo phase. For us getting links from blogs through product reviews is working great. We have a kids product and work with mom bloggers so the product resonates well. Often I will ask bloggers to do sidebar links in addition to links that they have included in their review. I was starting to get nervous about the sidebar links with all of the paid links stuff I am reading about.
Over time we will strive for some link diversity though. Not an easy task but I think it will happen naturally over time.
So it looks like link buying can work as a short term strategy, or even a medium term strategy, depending on how long you are able to evade Google.
This opens up the potential for using link buying for short term campaigns. Say you are running a week long promotion for some product. You can just register some throwaway domain, then buy links to get it to rank highly for the duration of the campaign. Google may banish the site eventually, but it doesn't matter since it's just a throwaway campaign, and you've already seen the benefit of the links. It's another way of buying traffic, but instead of paying google, you pay a third party and get an organic listing.
Wow, Rand has an alter ego that buys links! Seriously though, I think that was a great test to run; definitely worth seeing the results. Now we know one more black hat way the competition gets an edge on us...
Best of luck to you, Scott!
Assuming a text link works and is valued the same as alt text behind a banner ad, why aren't G and other search engines de-valuing banner ads? Why have they focused their attention on paid text links? You pay to have a banner placed, right? (Unless I'm wrong and text links and alt text don't work the same way.)
But isn't a paid text link just another form of advertising to the average Joe? The average person who visits a website isn't going to notice the difference between a banner ad and a text link except that maybe a banner ad looks cooler and perhaps is more enticing to click on.
Of course I should refresh my memory on the nuances here, but suffice it to say that banner ads are usually "nofollowed" and there is usually a nofollow on advertizing networks where you use a descriptive anchor text title with a tiny marketing blurb after it.
The Google wants juice passing links to be from real people endorsing the related subject matter within their own sites and related external sites. Many advertising networks (and probably many blog comment sections and forum posts, plus other widgetized content components) prevent link equity/juice passing.
I think I will be calling Google the Great Eye from now on (sans evil connotation, of course). I do love the Google, stll.
I *think I understand what you're saying.
But when I'm placing a banner ad or a text link on a site, assuming they are relevant to the site's subject matter, it's agreed between myself and the site owner that they are not to include the no-follow tag on the banner or text link, whether it's paid for or not.
So why, then, would Google count one but not the other?
Technically, Google can treat a followed banner ad links as a paid link and discount or penalize it. They don't always, but officially Google policy says that all paid advertisements should be no-followed. Of course, many big brands quite visibly disregard this policy.
heh. I take the more traditional view of Google as God and black/white hat as Cain and Abel. You don't want to go wandering around in exile forever, but then again you don't want to get killed by the competition :P
Did something happen to the video? It keeps stopping halway through it.
Anyway, back on topic, great info. Although some of my competitors buy links (I had contacted a couple of sites giving those links to see if I could get on the blogroll and was told those stops are paid for, if I wanted it I'd have to pay $XXX a month), I won't go down that road. The possibility of being penalized is deterrent enough.
The most interesting Whiteboard Friday yet!
These make our Fridays in the office even better.
Great blog, really interesting to see.
One thing I'd be interested to see, if you want to take it further, is what effects, if any, consistent high quality anchor text in multiple links has post-MayDay rollout.
I have email filter contains "exchange links" or 'text link' it goes straight to the trash mark as read :D
I suggest Postini if you are running Google Apps for your domain, or burn any email that starts with "Dear Sir/Madam" or sent to sales@ or info@
Great post, the subject of buying links seems to still really make for an intense discussion. Must agree with Andy, seeing the effects for a longer period of time and maybe for a more competitive keyword would be extremely interesting. It's probably always a game of chance, though, even if only 2 out of 10 sites get penalized, the risk you take for your business is enourmous. Statistics just don't help when your chaimber in Russian roulette is loaded.
Also I must agree, I think the surrounding context and other factors certainly pay a large part. I believe google will get more suspicious when they are 10+ footer links to totally different sites, then a couple going out to related subjects. The penalty mentioned to your friends seemed a bit harsh, indeed.
Great white board Friday, sorry to hear Scott is leaving, I hope this doesn't change the WBF.
Oh and Scott the grass isn't always greener!
Where were the paid links? Content, side bar, etc?
Content area ... with various levels of keyword matching across page title, etc. As Rand mentioned there's truly not enough info to write a paper over these findings, but nevertheless they represent an interesting experiment.
Rand you have opened Padora´s Box: Big G and Matt Cutts are going to come after you...
"Etymology: based on an old Greek story in which a woman named Pandora opened a box containing all the troubles the world has experienced."
Great post. A few things stick out for me.
Seems from experiment # 3 further nails down that anchor text with matching title tags from a high quality site is the best SEO play.
Experiment # 4 is somewhat disturbing because seems that we could just go buy paid links for our competitor and one day they will get nailed.
I think it is good and working enough for us.
Great WBF, Rand! Cyrus, you know you've saved him from having to come up with topics for three weeks, right?
Scott, best of luck to you, wherever you land. Don't fail to stop in now & then and rattle a few cages, hear?
I have to agree with those that said link buying isn't evil. It's risky, if not done carefully. Personally, I've never bought links, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't. A friend recently said that in some niches, it's almost a necessity, and I think that's probably true.
It's just a risk/reward judgement call.
Great experiment rand! :)
And i wish you the best with your future adventures Scott!
It may be true that bought links can lead you to "Google Penalization", but it is up to you to decide who you link with. Bought links are a gamble and will certainly reflect on your site. Poor links could result in poor rankings. Don't get me wrong, poor natural sites may be better than purchased "good" sites. We all need to do our homework to find out.
This is a very enlightening post. I've personally stayed on the conservative side of this tactic and not bought 'paid links'. However, I don't know that every single one of them will or can be found out. More grey area here to play with I suppose.
Scott- Thanks for all your efforts over the years!
paid links strategy like the examples on this blog post can be effective, especially on to smaller sites (3rd tier) websites
Rand -- did you have idea what you were getting into?
Fun expertiment! :)
Nice post!
REally great post Rand, thanks! I think it's very good to even experiment with the subjects that you don't stand out for! That way you know that the things you are doing are the right thing to do.
I also like the fact that you'r going in the opposite direction by doing paid links, and at the end of the presentation immediately go against it. That makes, apart from the content, a really good presentation!
You're doing it wrong... just sayin. Check your email Rand :-)
I'm not really sure we want to "do it right" and I'm not sure I believe that there are solid ways, in the long run, to avoid the potential perils. Will try to get to your email tomorrow though - thanks!
Thanks for all the stuff you have done for us GreatScott!!
Thanks for the post. It's certainly sparked some debate. It seems to be that the risks associated with buying links far outweigh the benefits.
maybe now that @Mattcutts is back visiting, everyone who is for link buying in the comments is going to get that special message in webmaster tools ;)-
Good point Lost.
FYI: I hate bought links. Purchased links are evil. People that buy links are bad, bad, bad. Never buy links.
[now if I can only remember where I put the church bulletin that listed confessional times...]
This is a poor comment, I've got to admit it.
Never bought links hence do not know the art, science and stats. behind it so no comments on this topic.
Want to acquire links that work better than the ones Rand talked about in this post? email [email protected].
Use subject line: rank #1
I don't really know what to say. I guess three things come to mind:
A) The links I talked about worked surprisingly well., but the point was to show how even when things go well with paid links for a certain time period, the risk is high.
B) A post that recommends against link buying may not be the best place to solicit that service.
C) A Gmail account to receive information about link buying/selling? I thought most link sellers were more paranoid about Google's information chain...
Going to leave this comment up as it makes for interesting discussion.
@Rand i'm not sure if it highlighted the risk enough, maybe a followup post on the "friends of seomoz" that got hit with a penalty.
What was the overall loss of rankings, traffic and leads/revenue for the company. I think people are just going to see that your 3 examples showed buying links works and well you can worry about the problems later....
A gmail account are you serious, who is seriously going to send any information or express interest in links to a gmail account....
hahaha...
My guess is you will be given a list of 300 dummy blogspot blogs with one post PR0 and -PA (that possible? :) )
Anddd links from those sites have already been devalued or are on their way there.
AH! Things like this remember me an ancient greek quote once I had to translate and which sense was: Stupidity is an inexhaustible power.
I don't know if SEOmoz has never "saved" them, but it would be great a ranking of most hilarious, unuseless and made worse spam comments in SEOmoz blog.
Would you call not knowing the definition of the word "acquire" stupidity?
...just sayin
Hi Rand,
Thanks for responding to my comment! I really do have the utmost respect for you and wouldn't want to come across otherwise, but the comment was a bit of a practical joke and a bit of an experiment.
I wanted to test how many SEOs would assume I meant buying links when I said "acquire links"
Please note that in my comment I made no reference to buying links, I simply said that I can get links that work better than the ones you were talking about.
That could be link baiting, it could mean that I decided tobuy links without "buying links.", it could be (and turned out to be) construed as link buying. It could also be any number of other ways to acquire links.
The result, as far as I can tell is that everyone thought I meant link buying by link acquisition.
This is because no one pointed out that I never said anything about buying links in my comment and the nature of all the follow up comments gives me the impression that all those people assumed I meant link buying.
Interesting that the minds of so many SEO's go straight in that direction ;-)
So to those who were wondering, this is not Matt trying to bait SEO's. Also please note that I did not expect to actually get any business from the spammy comment.
Another noteworthy result was this:
If you think of the thin grey line that connects a follow up comment with the comment it is referencing as a link, then my comment attracted more links than all most all of the other comments on this post. The same logic that I used to get you all to reply to my comment can be used in a number of ways, including link baiting.
Sorry if I offended anyone.
I hope you liked my jokexperiment!
If part of your experiment was to see if you could "acquire" a record breaking number of thumbs down, then I would say it was an unqualified success.
A true experiment can never be a success or a failure. It can only prove or disprove a hypothesis. This particular experiment disproved my hypothesis as I thought at least one person would understand that acquire does not mean buy.
Thumbs up or thumbs down was not part of the experiment and an unexpected side effect, although I'm not concerned with the number of thumbs up or thumbs down on this profile.
"Acquire" has been standard industry slang for "buy" when it comes to links for years. Why? Because one usually buys the commercial goods one acquires. Your experiment is boringly semantic, and is like me saying that I've acquired an iPad, then feeling smug because people think I must have been rich enough to buy one, when in fact I won it in a competition. Which is a true story.
That is, your experiment is flawed because you assume everyone questions accepted slang. To give you another example, you wouldn't ask me if I wanted to go out for a drink and then stop me after I'd had one, because you'd only asked me if I wanted *a* drink, not two. "Do you want to go out for a drink?" implies more than one drink in our society.
All this said, to me, this sounds like so much back-peddling.
If you told me you acquired an iPad, I'd smile slightly, maybe chuckle and then ask you how you acquired it. Because I'd figure if you purchased it, you'd probably say that.
If I asked you if you wanted to go out for a drink and you were kind enough to say yes, I'd expect you to have a drink and then I would ask you if you'd like another one when you had finished the first one. If you wanted a second drink that would be cool. If you didn't, that would be cool too.
When I've heard SEO's use the term "acquire links" it hasn't been in reference to buying links most of the time. I've most often heard that phrase used in scenarios where an SEO was using many different ways to gain links for a site and didn't see the need to list them all in a specific sentence referencing the link acquisitions. So I'm not sure that all SEO's use that slang but apparently from the results of my experiment everyone in the SEOmoz community seems to.
In any regard, I thought my comment would spark a debate in which someone else would point out the difference between acquire and buy. But my hypothesis was disproved in this instance, so I had to respond to keep from having a one sided debate which is always extremely dull.
....On a side note, I hope that SEOmoz appreciates the 1000 (guestimate) extra words of text that responses to my comment + my comments have added to their article....
:-)
BS Experiment. Neither funny nor informative.
The title of the post is "We Bought Links and It Worked!!". I can imagine a lot of people just read the headline and started buying links!
From: Matt
To: [email protected]
Subject: rank #1
I'm interested in these links of which you speak...
From a basic google search it seems to be travel sites but i'm sure they have lots of other quality blogs....
Maybe this is Matt..........
Haha!! Will I think you hit it on the head!! Brilliant!! Matt Cutt's own version of Dateline: "To Catch a Predator". In Matt's version he ensnares webmasters looking to buy paid links.
Hi Jane,
Please read my response to Rand above. Let me know what you think of my Jokexperiment.
Thanks :-)
Hahahaha ha omg what an idiot!
Classic! I'm hoping that with just a few short clicks that I can get some paid links, 3 more inches, V1@agra, more man strength, become thinner, get richer and for all that is good and holy in this world ... please bring back Web Position Gold.
To heck with you all SEO pansies ... I'm going BIG time! Eat my dust. ...now what was that gmail address again? Hmmm?
Jeez I didn't even know you could buy links. I will have to look into that :-)
ROTFL