Throughout this chapter, we have provided many examples of how spammers try to circumvent search engine guidelines to obtain high rankings for sites that may not deserve those rankings. Of course, the search engines do many things to fight link spam.
The major approach the search engines use is to design algorithms that can detect and act on link spam. There are a number of things they can look at algorithmically. Here are a representative few:
- Links labeled as advertisements
The search engines can scan for nearby text, such as “Advertisement,” “Sponsors,” “Our Partners,” and so on.
- Sitewide links
Sitewide linking is unnatural and should be a rare part of your link mix (purchased or not). The only exception to this is the interlinking of all the sites owned by your company, but this presumes that the search engine will understand that all of your sites are from the same company. In general, sitewide links are a serious flag, especially if you have a lot of different sites that do this for you, or if a large percentage of your links are sitewide.
- Links sold by a link broker
Of course, link brokers are knowledgeable about the link detection methods listed here, and they do their best to avoid detection with the links they sell. But they can still run into problems. For example, Google took action against a long-time proponent of paid links, We Build Pages, resulting in We Build Pages changing its stance on the subject (http://www.webuildpages.com/blog/link-techniques/paid-links-arent-worth-it/).
- Selling site has information on how to buy a text link ad
Search engines can detect sites that provide information on how to advertise with them. Combined with other clues about links being sold on the site, this could lead to a review of the site selling the ads and a discounting of the links.
- Relevance of your link
It is a powerful clue if your link is not really that relevant to the page or site it is on.
- Quality of neighboring links
Another clue would be the presence of your link among a group of links that are not tightly themed.
- Location outside main content
The search engine can detect when your link is not part of the main content of the page. For example, it appears in the left or right column of a three-column site, and the main content is in the middle.
Perhaps you can avoid all of these pitfalls, but one more problem remains: people can see that you are buying links and choose to report your site, using Google’s authenticated paid links reporting form (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1). Note that you need to be logged in to a Google account to see the form. Here are some examples of people who might take this action:
- Someone reports your site for buying links or for some other reason
Who would do this? Your competitor! If your competitor submits an authenticated spam report to Google, Google will look at it and act on it.
- Someone reports the site you bought links from for selling links or for some other reason
A competitor of yours can do this, or a competitor of the site selling links can do this. Once a search engine figures out that a site is selling links, it is possible that this could trigger a deeper review of the sites that were buying those links.
- A disgruntled employee leaves your company, the broker, or the site you bought links from and reports your site
For decades, many companies have had a practice of escorting fired (or laid off) employees out of the building. The reason for this approach is that people get upset when they lose their job. However, this practice would not prevent such a person from reporting your site in a spam report to a search engine. Even though that may be a violation of the confidentiality agreement you probably have with your employees, you would never know, because there is no transparency in spam reporting.
- A search engine employee does a manual human review of your site
The search engines do maintain staffs of people who conduct human reviews of sites, which they use to proactively find and report spam.
Certainly your competitor reporting your site would be the most likely scenario, but you should not entirely discount the other scenarios.
In the case of Google, it is known that one of the basic policies is to punish a site that sells text links by eliminating that site’s ability to pass link juice. This is essentially a first course of action. Once this is done, Google could look more closely at the selling site and the purchasing sites for other signs of spammy behavior.
Google has also at times taken the step of altering a site’s visible PageRank (the PageRank shown on the Google Toolbar) if it believes a site is selling links. This has been applied to some very significant sites, such as NewsDay.com.
Google can also choose to take action against the site purchasing the links or participating in manipulative link practices. If a large percentage of the site’s links are suddenly disabled, this could have a very significant impact on rankings.