Seems purchased links stopped working. Different algo for different sites?

[thewealthbuilder]

After reading thoroughly many threads on latest updates, algo changes and the traffic shaping and normalization theory, it seems Google algo has fixed the Link buying thing.

Different algo for different sites - Some sites are still ranking via paid links but almost all of them are either brands or may be sites in the upper bucket.

I bought 2 PR 6 links, no effect on traffic and rankings.

I am of strong opinion current Google algo has taken care of this link buying manipulation.

[BenFox]

They might have applied a filter to the sites you bought from but I think you might be going too far to say that they have solved the problem altogether.

[goodroi]

Google has tried and will continue to try to identify paid links and to devalue them. It is possible to find some paid links that have yet to be devalued. It is also possible to find active paid links that are no longer passing any significant link juice.

I recently reviewed a website and cut their paid link monthly budget from $1000 to $50 and they maintained their rankings and traffic levels. It was a good example of how paid links that gave a ranking boost when they were originally bought might not be helpful anymore.

[thewealthbuilder]

Exactly goodroi. You hit the nail on the head.

[cloudtap]

It seems as though the buying of links and the ranking of landing pages / pages of your site has an echo effect in the search algos. You can get rid of hundreds of links to a site and the site will keep its ranking based upon historical data in Google until 1 or 2 Google updates later. It seems as though you can boost your rankings fairly quickly and then get rid of the links and your site's ranking will echo for months to quarters of the year

[walrus]

Must be hard to detect without also mislabelling many, i would imagine many sites getting hit with stray bullets.

[tedster]

At least if the links are only devalued (rather than penalized) those stray bullets will not do so much damage.

Also, there's been a clean-up in other areas of link juice passing. For example, footer links to other sites seem to be devalued too, but not given a penalty. This seems like a sane "reasonable surfer" approach to me.