Webicy Blog

Today I found a nice article written by domainpubber on how Google Identifies Paid Links.

Below is the Top Five Ways Google Identifies Paid Links mentioned in his article

1. Your Competitor Reports You – That’s right; the GSP (google secret police) can use Google’s form to turn you in even if you don’t buy or sell links. Their form says “Google uses a number of methods to detect paid links, including algorithmic techniques”
2. Manual Human Intervention – Nobody knows for certain outside of Google, but they must have humans who follow up on the GSP leads to try and verify the reports
3. Algorithmic Techniques – Some paid links would be very easy to identify using algorithms, including:
   • Site wide header, sidebar and footer links
   • Pages with headings that read “Sponsor Links”, “Favorite Sites”, etc.
   • Any block of links appearing in a specific section of a page
   • Links that use obvious anchor text
   • Sites with lots of inbound links to the same URL with the same anchor text
4. Rapid Backlinking – Sites that get a lot of backlinks in a very short time span will be highly suspect
5. Hidden Links – Google’s Matt Cutts has discussed this practice on his blog

Matt Cutts has provided many other ideas on identifying paid links on his blog. There are certainly a lot of other means Google could be using to identify paid links.

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