Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have also read that if you buy links, or use link farms, your site will be penalized.
I can buy 5,000, sure to kill a site links for $9.95. Do a Google search, you can find heaps of sites that sell these.
So, to get my site from the top of page 15 to the top of page one, I buy 140 of these $9.95 packages and point them at each site above me in the SERPS.
Within a few days, the Google penalties kick in and Bingo, I'm in the number one spot.
If Google are now penalizing sites for buying links, isn't it obvious that black hat SEO's are just going to buy the same links but just point them at their competitors instead.
A site that gets penalized could take months of red tape with Google to get re-included, but the damage would already be done. That's if the site owner could take the revenue cut, most probably wouldn't and would just fold.
Won't the new Black Hat growth industry be networks of link sites that can be used to induce Google penalties? For a fee, they'll take down your competitors site.
I have seen so many people posting that their site as dropped out of the SERPS recently. Are you sure you don't have a link pointing at your site that Google's algo has deemed to be a paid link and penalized your site? Just because you haven't paid for any links doesn't mean squat. If Google's algo thinks you've paid for a link, your out.
To quote Matt Cutts “As these indexing changes have rolled out, we’ve improving how we handle reciprocal link exchanges and link buying/selling. “
I think the assumption Google has made is that every single purchased link in the entire internet was purchased by the site owner in an attempt to boost the sites ranking. In the past, they simply gave these links zero value. By now punishing the purchasing of links, un-ethical site owners can now have the sites above them in the SERPS penalized and ejected rather than simply SPAM their way past them.
This is what happens when you allow a computer to make decisions that can effect peoples lives. The decision to eject a site because it has purchased links should only be made by a human after looking at all the evidence, and allowing the site owner time to respond to the charge that they have purchased links, and all this must be done, before the site is ejected. It's no good having a site automatically ejected and the site owner then having to go through months of rigmorol to be re-included trying to seek a human revue of his site by Google staff.
So, Google have stopped the Spammers, and created a new monster for website owners to contend with, SiteKiller Links.
For example - if your competitor is holding a high rank for 'heart health' you could throw thousands of links at him with the text 'love heart dating' and he'd find it harder to retain the focus on the key term.
His quality and existing incoming links would start to look irrelevant as they are from heart health sites, not dating sites - and his site itself would start to become less-and-less of a sure result for Google about heart health...
[edited by: minnapple at 5:23 am (utc) on May 17, 2006]
