Google penalising bought links
In the last couple of weeks it has been clear that google has penalised sites for buying links. In principle this can never happen. But I am convinced it has.
A common idea is that google can never penalise a site for the links TO the site. They can ban or otherwise penalise sites that sell links, but the idea is that they can’t penalise for bought links because it makes it easy to attack your competitor, simply by buying ‘bad’ links that point at their site.
We can all recognise, almost immediately, the majority of paid links and pay per post blogs. But can an algorithm do the same? And can a manual inspection be completely sure? I suspect that the algorithms are sufficiently advanced to prompt a manual investigation, because bought links almost never replicate manual linking patterns.
Manual links have two main characteristics - they tend, on average, to be from very low ranking pages, and they tend to have anchor text that is not the same as the ‘title’ of the page. Bought links usually get both of these wrong.
It doesn’t take a genius to guess that if a significant proportion of links to a page or site have the same anchor text, and are on high PR pages, there is a good probability they are bought links. Beyond a certain threshold you can pretty much be certain they are bought links.
Remember, google have access to billions of records. They really do know what a natural linking pattern looks like!
But this still leaves us with the thorny problem - how do they know if someone is attacking a competitor to get them banned? Well, related to the above, google recently hinted that they do have a ‘manual intervention’ team (see interview with Matt Cutts HERE) - that is, not all penalties are applied simply because of a computer algorithm. So they can look at the actual links manually, and form a judgement.
But realistically there must always be a theoretical risk, however small, of a site being banned from the index because of a competitor’s actions. I never heard of a case where someone actually got banned in this way, but it could exist. And the more they apply the penalty, the more probable it is that it might happen.
Which leaves them with the choice - do they throw ‘the baby out with the bathwater’, and hope it’s a small baby…or not bother. My belief is that they have decided the former. The occasional good site might get penalised because of actions out of their control, but 99.99% (a guess, the real percentage I have no idea of course) of the time google will be right, and that is good enough - that is, the improvement in the search enginge results is worth the potential loss of a site that actually has not been buying links.
Welcome to the brave new world!