“Paid links” is the topic du jour, and if you scan through your feed reader, you’ll no doubt find much expression of thought on the topic. To summarize, “Google are being big meanies when it comes to paid links”.

On the flip side, Google’s consistent denouncement of paid links should indicate only one thing to the seasoned Google watcher: paid links work.

After all, as Aaron and others point out, Matt doesn’t go on about meta tag abuse, now does he. This is because Google has solved the meta tag abuse problem, so meta tags aren’t even worth mentioning.

Here’s some proof in the pudding:

“Last year a client in a very competitive niche wanted his brand new site to rank number 1 across all his keywords. The niche was the kind that any self respecting webmaster would never link their site to for fear of being in a bad neighbourhood so linkbaiting was not an option. The method we used was to buy a LOT of links from any site that would take us. Poker sites, adult sites, sitewide links at directories, forum signatures. Every type of link that is blatantly a paid link.

We didn’t get one natural link in 12 months and spent a 5 figure sum on paid links.

Sure enough after 12 months the site went to number 1 and is still there today.

If you play with paid links you might get burned. On the other hand you might make 10k per week from organic rankings“

Not an uncommon practice, I might add. Look through any of those above mentioned categories and you’ll see thousands of examples.

That’s exactly how ultra-competitive serp categories are played these days.

I’ve been reading this search blog for a while. You should, too. It’s one of the best.

On paid links*:

“This is all so silly, and it is all a consequence of the largest and most successful web company in the world refusing to yield to innovation and the emerging competitive marketplace we call the Internet. Come on Google, you’ve made a fortune selling links and controlling referral traffic on the web. Web publishers have had enough. We need to move forward. If you say we need links, we have to be able to use our currency to get them. Markets set the relative values of the various currencies, not Google. The days when Google could claim “good will” as the Internet currency are long past. They were flooded out by all those millions in stock option redemptions. You took the cash — why can’t anyone else?”

*John Andrews didn’t pay me to say that. I don’t even know John Andrews. Honest, guv’

Graywolf* also has a good take on the subject:

“Google added a new section to webmaster central today entitled “report paid links”. How anyone other than me or quite possibly my book keeper know whether a link is paid or not is very questionable, but let’s dig just a little deeper shall we”

*Graywolf didn’t pay me to say that. I don’t even….etc…..

Matt Cutts does a Q&A after many webmasters became concerned about his paid links post.

Interesting bits relating to how to evaluate a quality directory:

 ” Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory“

Also:

“Are you interested in hearing about directories in this report?
A: Nope, I’d be most interested in feedback like the examples that I mentioned above, or things like paid posts that might affect search engines.“

In relation to a site on the topic of Unix, Matt mentioned that the paid links had been detected and discounted, which appears to indicate Google don’t tend to ban the site, just prevent PageRank from passing.

“Our existing algorithms had already discounted these links without any people involved. However, our manual spamfighters had detected these links as well“.

On the topic of competitor buying links on your behalf:

” I’m worried that someone will buy links to my site and then report that.
A: We’ve always tried very hard to prevent site A from hurting site B. That’s why these reports aren’t being fed directly into algorithms, and are being used as the starting point rather than being used directly.“

Matt again mentions the word “discounted”, as opposed to, say, ban or de-list.

Michael “Five links for $100″ Gray has tagged me in his dirty, filthy and despicable paid links scheme. Erm, meme.

I was even considering paying him $200 not to link to me, and stating, for the record, I wanted no part in it. But he said $200 was far too cheap for that sort of non-publicity, and I’d have to come up with a decent offer.

That gave me an idea. I think this marks the start of the paying-for-not-linking market.

Now, unless these five people come up with $500 bucks each not to link to them, I’m going to link to them.

To Be Paid Links

• John Scott
  
• Danny Sullivan
• Barry Schwartz
• David Burdon.….and, of course…
• Matt Cutts