Google’s detecting paid links

June 30, 2007

Recently the SEO world went mad because Google announced it was clamping down on paid links and with this it has now added an extra part to Webmaster tools to be able to report suspects of paid linking.

This is not something new for Google in 2005 they looked into Paid links and what they were doing to combat this, so firstly how can they detect paid links?

It generally falls into the following:

Links Labelled as Advertisements
Site Wide links
Relevance of Nearby Links
Advertising Location

So how do you generate links from your site if the above paid link methods are becoming discredited?

Well, directories are a good method, they keep relevance to a section within a site and don’t fall into any of the above, the next method of link building is traditional link baiting, this is where you encourage people to link to your site because there is something worth talking about, whether its a tool, article or something similar, this fits in with how Google wants the web to work and getting natural links this way can work out far cheaper than paying for links.

For further information on setting your website with methods of link baiting contact one of our SEO consultants.

Neil
Head of Organic Search