How to find site buying links?

There are several ways in which Google can identify sites buying links to manipulate SERPs on the Google search engine.

1. Unnatural links

   The site receives many unnaturally looking links. This can be an indicator that the links were bought or exchanged or part of a link building system. In good faith, Google will not penalize the site but will analyze the sites that link to you and see if they meet the criteria of link sellers (see How Google finds sites selling links).

2. High PR links on highly competitive keywords

   It’s highly suspicious if a PR8 site about computers links to your site with an anchor like “mortgage”. Again, this must be considered in relation to the site selling links.

3. A huge number of links at once

   This goes to the issue of popularity of your website. It should have a steady growth. You can’t have an influx of 100 links on a single day. This raises a red flag. Definitely there is something going on.

Detecting link buyers may not be a difficult thing to do. The real problem is how to definitely determined if a given set of links was bought or not. There is always a possibility that your competitor may be doing you some sort of nasty favor. It is extremely hard to state with 100% certainty that the site has bought some links. There is always an element of doubt. But any doubt can disappear if you go after sellers. Detecting buyers is closely related to detecting sellers. Hence it becomes impossible to go after buyers only. Once the Google SE gets its bearing on your site, it will analyze all the sites that link to you. It will try to identify various characteristics of links sellers and then will make a decision with respect to your site. You can be penalized the same way the seller is penalized.

Everyone has been wondering if Google has got the necessary tools to identify paid links. After all, only the buyer and the seller are involved in the transaction, so how can a search engine, a robot, be part of this confidential process? The answer is IT CAN’T. It is impossible to write an algorithm that can find the so-called paid links, but it is possible to create an algorithm that can find possible suspects. The rest involves a human factor. A careful review of the site might sometimes provide sufficient information to make a decision as to the nature of the origin of the links placed on the site. Google has the ability to detect some of the paid links and some potential paid links. There are certain factors that can raise a red flag.

1. Headings

   Headings that read “Sponsored Links”, “Partners”, “Links”, “Interesting Pages”, “Sponsors”, “Friends”, “Advertisers”, etc.
   Links listed under these headings are just suspects. Many well-known sites (e.g. http://www.latimes.com/) have these types of links, but not necessarily the links have been bought. This is just an indicator that there might be something going on and this requires a human review.

2. Placement of links

   If there is a series of links, a link cluster, a search engine might also find it suspicious. This is another indicator, but too common all over the net. Almost every site on the Web has some sort of link series. This is yet another indicator but not very reliable. Human review would be infeasible and impractical. It has to be taken into account together with other factors.

3. Analytics report

   If you run Google Analytics on your site, then Google gets a lot of information about your visitors. If the site gets a lot of hits from links sale forum at Digitalpoint (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=58) or similar sites, this definitely calls for a human review.

4. Links spiders

   What kind of natural links get spidered every day to check if they’re still there? This goes back to the analytics report. A lot of link buyers run software to check if their links are where they’re supposed to be. This can be deadly to your site, because this might be a very powerful indicator that the link was purchased. Here is a quote from one of the readers of this article: "
   Because google analitycs is a .js and spiders don’t load js-files, so google will not know if the links are checked by spiders". Frankly, I don’t know what type of technology Google uses beyond what they are willing to show us. They can definitely identify click fraud which is done by different software including js files, so can they see if a particular IP comes every day and visits the same page over and over again?

5. Pure mathematics

   It is easy to construct an algorithm that analyzes the site in terms of outgoing links. Google knows the theme of your site. It has also information (or will have one) about the themes of the sites you link to. If you link to 100 sites and large majority of them is in no way connected to the subject of your site, then apparently there might be a problem. Why would a site about Google want to link to a casino or a palm reader? The algorithm can calculate a percentage of irrelevant links. When the percentage reaches a certain level, a search engine sounds an alarm. This may call for a human review or result in a temporary ban. The search engine such as Google might wait for the site owner’s response. In the Google reconsideration request you have to admit your sins. This is the best confirmation whether the system works properly.

6. Link rotation

   If the links on you site start to disappear and in their place new links start to pop in, that’s a good indicator that there is magic involved in the story. When you create a page and put some links on it, you generally don’t change them unless the page that you’re linking to is no loger available – in that case you remove or replace the broken link.

7. Snitch report

   Google introduced a quick squeal button at their website in the Webmaster Tools. Anybody dissatisfied with their competitors can report potential link sellers or buyers.

8. You sold it to Google

   Highly unlikely and too expensive. Even with the resources Google have, they can’t afford and have no time to go and buy links. This would be a redandent shopping spree. They will never do that (but if they did, that would be really pathetic)

9. You openly talk about selling links

   No comment.

Identification of paid links is very hard for a mindless robot, but taking all of factors into consideration, it becomes possible to find potential culprits. If you have a small site and you’re not the Detroit Free Press (http://www.freep.com), which is just an example (doesn’t mean they sell links), then Google can wipe your tiny buttocks off the face of this planet and nobody will ever care. They will wait for your response (admitting the crime) or simply kill the site as a preventive measure. One site this or that way does not make that much difference.

Remember! If your site is a duplicate or has characteristics of some e.g. DMOZ copy or a number of other things that Google doesn’t like, you may disappear from the search engine with no investigation and no human review.

Skip this part if you’re not a novice and go to the main ranting on PageRank.

To start off, we have to define what the so-called PageRank is. PageRank is a trademark owned by Google Inc. Google technology page provides the following explanation of PageRank:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

PageRank is a ballot cast by a website for another website. It is sort of a vote on how good a given page is. This is, of course, just a very idealistic definition. If you decide to review a website and in your review you bash it, slash it, and verbally kill it, telling your readers that it is a waste of their time, but at the same time you place a link to that site, so that you readers can take a look at what you’re talking about, Google treats that link as a vote in favor of that site. In other words, you have just cast a positive vote for that site.

The vote is a numerical value (from 0 to 10 where 10 is the best ranking) assigned by the Google algorithm. The higher it is the better, in theory and practice.

In short, the more sites link to your site and the higher their PageRank the more valuable your site seems to be in the eyes of Google.

Some people believe that PageRank has lost its value and that there is no connection between PageRank and position of a website on a search engine result page (SERP). This might have been the case some time ago. I believe that the things have recently changed.

Does PageRank still matter?

A little historical overview first (a rather simplified version)

The World Wide Web (WWW) has been developing for quite a number of years now. At some point, long time ago, webmasters figured out how the Google algorithm works. They noticed a connection between PR and SERPs, so they did anything they could to influence the SERPs. The best way to do that in the past was to get links from sites that Google treated as authority sites (IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, etc). It was not that easy at first, but over time the number of high PR pages started to grow rapidly. This evolved into a huge Internet business. Money changed hands and the links from high PR pages produced more high PR sites. At this point even the authors of PageRank algorithm noticed that the system was flawed and needed to be fixed. PageRank came to the point where there was too much of it on the Web. This point was last year. Webmasters, who were screaming that PR didn’t matter at that time, might have been right to a certain extent, but only to a very limited extent. If your site was ranked at PR8, you did very well on your main keywords, but could have been outranked by PR5 sites that had more text links with your keywords. It did not mean that those sites were considered better than yours. You had the PR juice and they had more links with keywords that you didn’t have. You still might have had a better traffic because your visitors were generated mostly by the phrases on your pages that you didn’t consider that important (niche phrases). If you wanted to rank No1, all you had to do was to get more text links with your keywords. If a PR8 site was about cars and decided to start a campaign to get links under that keyword, it would become No1 very quickly. PR was very powerful but there were a lot of PR8 sites. If 200 PR8 sites start competing for the same keyword, you might say that PR no longer matters. And this is exactly what happened. The flow of the PageRank over the Web was way too large and Google decided to decrease it and bring it back to the level where it has its old value and makes difference. This is what happened at the last PR update in October, 2007 and it is still happening as we speak. (Of course, all these differences in PR were less visible among low PR sites)

PageRank is just fine

A most recent debate coming from Google is about atacking the sites that engage in link schemes, mostly buying and selling links. Matt Cutts (a Google guy enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam) went on the war against link buyers and sellers, telling everyone that it’s against the Google guidelines to engage in this type of practice, becasue buying links that pass on PageRank influances the SERPs. Matt Cutts was the guy who, in the past, would say something like “don’t worry about PageRank! Create a content! That’s what you should be focusing on.”. All those who belive that PR doesn’t matter anymore can hear it from Matt himself saying that PageRank matters and matters A LOT. If Google found a way to algorithically identify paid links or any irrelevant links, why do they go on a crusade agianst link buyers and sellers? Why do they want to create a bunch of snitches running around and squelling on one another?

Guys at Google can’t have it both ways. Either PageRank matters and affects SERPs and then you should care about it a lot or it doesn’t matter, in which case why did Google start a war on links passing PR?

The next PageRank update

This is a complete speculation on my part, but I believe that’s what is going to happen. Webmasters all over the world get a fever every three months or so. The last PR update in October produced more causalities than 1665 London Plague. Webmasters could not believe that PR update was so late.

This was nothing! You ain’t seen nothing yet, buba!

Wait till you see the next PR update. The level of PR juice is decreasing. Google will remove a lot of sites from its index and devalue sites that buy & sell links. The PR has to regain its strength and the only way to do it is to drop a number of high PR sites. In addition, Google asks sites to used a nofollow tag. There is a growing atmosphere of terror. A lot of people are afraid to link even to their friends. We will see a lot of sites use a nofollow tag or avoid linking to other sites, which, in turn, will turn the PR river into a Pr creek. My prediction is that at the next PR update a PR7 site will be an icing on the cake and PR8 will cost you all your organs.

But… for now, I can just chew on Matt Cutts’ spit and wait for a few months to see if my rants become reality.

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