30 June 2010
There has always been a lot of debate in the SEO world surrounding this subject so I thought I would throw my spin on it. I believe Google can detect paid links to a degree but not in all cases.

As a provider of SEO services to other peoples websites, I would ask yourself is it worth getting penalised for buying links when you are potentially messing around with somebody else’s lively hood.

Imagine how you would explain to a client that their website no longer ranks for their brand name because of some paid links you have purchased on their behalf. Would it not be far more cost effective and more productive to spend a little time writing some content that will attract quality links naturally? After all if your main SEO strategy is to buy links in for clients then you are not really a good SEO and your competitors can also do the same and in effect match you link for link.

By creating editorial links you are hopefully gaining the edge on the competition by obtaining links that they can’t. It may take longer but if dealing with somebody else’s website it’s a much safer option and will help cement your client in the rankings by proving solid harder to duplicate links.

I said at the beginning of this post that I believe Google can detect paid links but not all of them. What I mean is in some cases it is impossible to know if a link has been paid for especially if the particular link isn’t surrounded by any other links, is totally relevant to the page copy and isn’t specifically anchored using blatant keywords. However this could still be a paid link.

It would be unfair of Google in my opinion to penalise a website for buying links especially as in the example above there are probably millions of the above types of links all over the internet that are flying under the radar. If it’s on a huge scale then fair enough some action needs to be taken.

Let’s look at another scenario. If buying links will get your website penalised what’s to stop a competitor buying lots of links on your behalf from lots and lots of really bad websites and having them pointing to your website. This method would be far cheaper for a competing website than paying for SEO services on their own site. If this was the case then there are companies out there who would do this all of the time. How would you talk your way out of that situation when filing for re inclusion?

My conclusion is that I do believe Google have some form of algorithm in place that takes a best guess if a link is a paid link or not so if you are dealing with a clients website I would steer clear of link buying and focus more on top quality content.

P.S Isn’t using Google Adwords content network in effect buying a link?