How Does Google Find Websites That Sell Links?

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7 Comments
January 18, 2009

For over a year now, Google has been cracking down on websites which sell links. In most cases, these websites were penalized by losing pagerank (PR). And in other more drastic cases, some of these websites had their pages completely dropped from the Google index.

With consequences this severe, two questions come to mind. First, how does Google find websites that sell links? And second, is Google ever wrong?

How Google Finds Paid Links

Google hints at several techniques for finding paid links, two of which include: (1) information supplied by Google users and (2) a special algorithm.

Method 1: Reliance on the Google Community

Google invites all users to manually report a website that they know is selling or buying paid links. But there is one obvious flaw to this method. Companies or individuals might maliciously use this form to report their competitors. Fortunately, Google does investigate all submissions, but it is hard to imagine that data from the user community would produce many legitimate leads.

Method 2: The Algorithmic Approach

Google also mentions the use of an algorithm which helps find paid links. However, this technique is flawed because paid links are often completely indistinguishable from unpaid links. For example, suppose a tech website such as Engadget were paid to publish a post about a new product from Apple or Dell, and linked directly to the external website. How would this be different from the other articles that they already publish? In fact, unless Google can find a paper trail or other irrefutable evidence that a website is selling links, then most paid links would not be caught.

Does Google Ever Make A Mistake?

So far, there have not been any widespread reports of Google making mistakes by incorrectly penalizing websites. But given that it uses algorithms to find paid links, there is a possibility for error. So here are some tips to ensure that Google never suspects your website.

1. Add nofollow to outbound links

Whenever you link to other websites, you share pagerank (PR). In most cases, this is not a problem. But if it is a paid link, Google does not want you to pass this pagerank on because it manipulates the search results. So all you need to do is to add rel="nofollow" to all such links as shown below.

<a href="http://www.example.com" rel="nofollow">Example</a>

Additionally, if you are linking to a commercial website, it is probably a good idea to make links nofollow.

2. Use redirects

Google also suggests the use of redirects, such that all outbound links are redirected via an intermediate page which is blocked from search engines.

What About Websites That Buy Links?

There is very little evidence that Google penalizes websites that buy links. After all, a company could maliciously buy links pointing to its competitor to get the site banned. So for the most part, penalties are directed at the website which sell links.

For more information on paid links, read about Paid Links in Google’s Webmasters/Site owners Help.

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Tags: Google, links

7 Responses to “How Does Google Find Websites That Sell Links?”

On January 19th, 2009 at 8:20 pm, Yan@Review wrote:

I’m always against the use of method #1. I figure it’s very much open to abuse by the competitors. How many times I’ve heard of some “authority” sites being stripped of PR due to ‘jealousy’.

The safest bet is to nofollow all the paid links. I’m using a plugin to nofollow all the links for any category of my choice. You don’t want to anger the God of Google, do you?

Yan

Yan@Review’s last blog post..Get Paid to Blog - Make Money Online Writing Reviews in 2009
On January 20th, 2009 at 3:22 am, Ajith Edassery | DollarShower wrote:

Good post… I am all for Google’s approach. I mean, if it’s granting search visibility for certain good content, it’s our responsibility to make sure that we don’t exploit it by selling PR links. That will sabotage the entire algorithm. Since it’s touching its own search preferences and not our sites, nobody has any right to talk against it.

However, in case Google is making a mistake, I guess they should give the bloggers/site owners another opportunity a few months down the lane. I see this not happening and that’s unethical from Google. And in the case of high profile sites and blogs, Google is in a vengeance mode!
On January 20th, 2009 at 3:44 am, Kurt Avish wrote:

Having said all that, however Google is extremely happy when we link back with dofollow to any google site Its a bit like an unbalance justice from my point of view.

I think the best is to set a limit of reasonable amount of links a website can sell… or for example… not more than 1 dofollow link per post of a blog.

There is a site called Inlinks and I wanted some of you people views about it. It normally gives a plugin to integrate into your site.. But is that not a real easy trap? Google just have to locate this plugin codes and punish the site? Or is it really protected as Inlinks say it?

Kurt Avish’s last blog post..What is Time? What is the real time?
On January 20th, 2009 at 11:55 am, Velvet Blues wrote:

@Yan: Yes, I don’t like the use of info from the community either. But it might be a source of good leads… And anything that makes the web a fairer place makes me happy. But yes, adding nofollow to all paid links is important. What plugin are you using?

@Ajith: I haven’t really heard of any ‘mistakes’. But I feel that Google is fair. And those sites that were slapped with pagerank penalties have been able to recover when they stopped selling paid links. And yes, Google is in vengeance mode. haha. I will never do anything unethical!

@Kurt: Yes, I am now aware of the linking to Google. It really does help the pagerank of a page.

As for the ‘Inlinks’ plugin, I haven’t heard of it. I’ll do my research to see what it does.
On January 20th, 2009 at 9:47 pm, Nihar wrote:

I always took care about this. But, for me #2. use redirects is new.

Thanks for the info. Good post.

Nihar’s last blog post..How to Add Wordpress pages to Nav Bar
On January 21st, 2009 at 5:57 pm, Kim Woodbridge wrote:

While google is very helpful in many instances I am a little tired of how much control they have. For example, now they own feedburner - I feel like one company has too much control of our blogging activities.

I also lost page rank for no apparent reason in November - I’ve never had paid links. Then it “magically” came back in November. It’s seems almost whimsical without any real explanations provided as to what it going on. I think I would like more transparency.

Kim Woodbridge’s last blog post..6 WordPress Book and Notebook Themes
On January 22nd, 2009 at 3:54 am, Velvet Blues wrote:

@Nihar: Yes, sometimes you will notice this with blogs. They never link directly to webpages. The actual url is a redirect through their own website.

@Kim: Yes, “transparency” is apparently the word of the year. With Google, I agree, they do own too much. And quite often they do things which are not well explained.

Fortunately, they seem to be a very fair company. But I cannot wait until they get some REAL competition to ‘keep them honest’.

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