Link bombs are on me !

In recent weeks I have have seen an email in which Google quite clealry states that they have placed a penalty on a site solely due to the fact that they think it has bought links from other sites.

ie that bought links got a site a x point penlaty from the google abuse team.

Added to this google webmaster guidelines now say this

"Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results."

and I can now find no mention of the previous

"there is virtually nothing a competitor can do to harm your rankings."

This make me think the abuse team are going after bought links guys in such a way, that they are willing to leave the door open to link bombing.

I would suggest a 100 blog posts from sponsored reviews or pay per post followed up with a abuse report to google will see your competitors drop out of those rankings in double quick time.

Was their any indication of the duration of the penalty and what actions a site has to take to have the penalty removed?

It might not be simple to get paid links removed from third party sites!

Surely that would be disastrous for search? i mean Google will not be able to tell which websites are legit and which websites aren’t. Competitors will just do the same for all their competitors and then their competitors will do the same to them. Can’t swallow that one I’m afraid.

Do I see an experiment taking shape here..... i'd be happy to kick in $100 towards an experiment in buying links for example to see if google bombing works..

One of the big changes at Google is the move from algorithmic spam detection to human spam detection. It's pretty easy for a human to discover paid links.

I do see lots of issues once the word gets out that you can damage a competitor by placing links to them from known link sellers.

@sparrowhawk
and that is something that really scares me... i mean the system will be subjective rather than objective

I can also say that it was a human edited penalty and human spotters on the abuse team.

Algoryhthmically they cannot spot a paid link.

Not that I know and free to divulge, but they hadn't been removed last I checked.



That seems to be what google wants, just is looking for more than token removals.


Anyway ....

Im starting to think google may be acting illegally in the area of restrictive practices here. Who are google to activley try to manipulate link selling deals between third parties which are thier competitors and clients?

ie Company A sells links.
Google sells paid adverts.
Thus Google competes with site A for adverts.

Google penalises anyone who uses compoany A's links and trys to restrict how it can do its business in an aggresssive manner.

Is this similar to what microsoft was got for a few years back, in not opening its source code to other software manufacturers ? And using it dominance in the market to shut other players out ?

Does anyone with a better legal mind than mine have a take on this ?

Looking at it the abuse team must be confident they can manually spot a fake from a real campaign.

These penalties are manual and not algorythmic.

You point all the links at my site

I actually disagree here that Google are trying to be anti-competitive here.

What Google are trying to stop is link buying for SERPS manipulation, not for advertising.

There is a method to safely buy links for advertising, and that is have them nofollowed.

Googles adverts do not give a SERPS advantage.

It's not anti-competitive.

Well, we already know that google is always watching for those who sell links that will also manipulate rankings. The question is, how long that they will do this and how accurate their technique in determining that your are selling links. We know that there are millions of websites, and there are also lots of numbers of site that sells links. Does all of them got penalized?

From what I've heard at search engine conferences, Google says they will only remove the link juice from paid links. This alone would degrade the link popularity of the site the paid links were pointing to.

Perhaps the other backlinks on sites with paid links pointing to them are examined manually. If they too look like paid links, then the link juice from them is also removed, seemingly to cause penalty to site with paid backlinks.