How does Google determine if a link is paid or not?
-
We are currently doing some outreach to bloggers to review our products and provide us with backlinks (preferably followed). The bloggers get to keep the products (usually about $30 worth). According to Google's link schemes, this is a no-no. But my question is, how would Google ever know if the blogger was paid or given freebies for their content?
This is the "best" article I could find related to the subject: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2332787/Matt-Cutts-Shares-4-Ways-Google-Evaluates-Paid-Links
The article tells us what qualifies as a paid link, but it doesn't tell us how Google identifies if links were paid or not. It also says that "loans" or okay, but "gifts" are not. How would Google know the difference? For all Google knows (maybe everything?), the blogger returned the products to us after reviewing them.
Does anyone have any ideas on this? Maybe Google watches over terms like, "this is a sponsored post" or "materials provided by 'x'". Even so, I hope that wouldn't be enough to warrant a penalty.
-
I haven't reviewed all of the comments on this post thoroughly, but I thought it was imperative to mention this. If you are paying someone to review your product they are required by law, at least in the U.S., to acknowledge that. Not doing so would be violating FTC guidelines, and bring on potential fines.
Source:
http://www.business.ftc.gov/documents/bus71-ftcs-revised-endorsement-guideswhat-people-are-asking
-
Agree completely with the above responses.
Bottom line: Google has some of the smartest people in the world working on these issues. In the end, they will prevail.
The idea that can can fool Google or game the system is...well, foolish.
At best, you might be able to score some temporary gains by disregarding the guidelines.
And then the hammer will fall.
-
Hi Jampaper,
Just to preface, I spend my days wading through the unnatural links sewer looking at the mess people have gotten themselves into because they thought they were smarter than Google or had that "how would Google ever know" thought in their heads.
EGOL is spot on with his response.
The criteria for undesirable links is not "how would Google ever know it's unnatural?", but "is it unnatural?"
On the "How", here are some things to consider:
-
Google's reach and ability to mine and interpret data (accurately or not) is so far outside our comprehension that it is probably better we don't even think about it.
-
Reviewers have a habit of unitentionally sharing information or creating patterns in the way they do things that are a clear red flag for orchestrated reviews
-
"These reviews always point to inner pages" ...Ooops! There's a pattern
-
"We're obviously targeting authoritative sites which do do reviews" ...Ooops! another pattern
-
Unnatural links on "Authoritative sites" would be more likely to enrage me if I were a member of the Webspam team than those on less influential sites. Let's face it, nobody ever sent me an email suggesting they could sell me links on a crap site
-
(and this you should take as very tongue in cheek, but perhaps give some thought to implications)
This site has upwards of 400,000 community members. One of them is a guy who is currently on leave from his job at G, but occasionally comments on Moz blog posts that interest him (that's the tongue in cheek part as while it is possible, I seriously doubt he or any of the other Googlers who might be members spend time combing through this site looking for extra work!)However, it doesn't take much imagination to think there may be other people out there who could be made aware and if they were a certain kind of person might be likely to look into a backlink profile and perhaps lodge a report. Once the manual review process comes into play, the cleverness of the algorithm is irrelevant.
When you have a great product your customers will always be your best sales force! Do things that make THEM want to tell people how THEY feel about you. If you do that enough, even those Authoritative sites will be checking you out for themselves and gifting you natural links
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
-
I will amend what I said. It's never sudden when we get a review, there's plenty of communication between both parties first. It takes a while. These reviews/backlinks always point to inner pages as well, so it's not like one product page has a lot of review backlinks.
Thank you for your help!
-
We're obviously targeting authoritative sites which do do reviews.
OK... same crappy product getting no authentic reviews. Suddenly a ton a reviews appear on "authoritative" websites. Somebody did something to make that happen.
So Google has real people just combing the web for these types of cases? No algo?
They have a really simple algo that catches this stuff.
-
That's what I thought. I believe the point of the article above was to more or less scare SEOs away from attempting to get paid links.
-
We're obviously targeting authoritative sites which do do reviews.
"Engineers not required" is interesting. So Google has real people just combing the web for these types of cases? No algo?
-
Product A exists for years and nobody is sayin' anything about it. Then, BAM, a ton of crappy reviews appear on a bunch of crappy sites..... Somebody did somethin' to make that happen - especially when those reviews appear on sites that do not make a practice of reviewing products. Engineers not required.
-
Google probably doesn't know. There are probably some incredibly convoluted methods they could use to determine it, but in general they don't know. This is why Penguin causes collateral damage and they haven't updated it again - they can't really differentiate between a spammy link / naturally placed link / negative SEO / etc.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Third part http links on the page source: Social engineering content warning from Google
Hi, We have received "Social engineering content" warning from Google and one of our important page and it's internal pages have been flagged as "Deceptive site ahead". We wonder what's the reason behind this as Google didn't point exactly to the specific part of the page which made us look so to the Google. We don't employ any such content on the page and the content is same for many months. As our site is WP hosted, we used a WordPress plugin for this page's layout which injected 2 http (non-https) links in our page code. We suspect if this is the reason behind this? Any ideas? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz1 -
Is this negative SEO? Should I disavow these links?
We have been doing our own internal link building for the last year and getting nice backlinks. As of the last few days, ahrefs is showing a lot of new links that seem very spammy. We have not hired anyone to do link building for us, and these are all being created on these sites under the same user name. There is a good amount of them popping up, and I fear we will be subjected to a google pentalty for unnatural links if its not addressed. My first question is, am I correct thinking this is negative seo, and not some random sites that picked up our content and is going across their affiliate websites? If so, then should I preemptively disavow all these links? Are there any good ways to stop this? How can I track who is placing these garbage links? Here are some examples of these bad links. I know I can find the webmaster via a whois but I think that really wont get me anywhere, but I could be wrong. Here are some examples of the links that started popping up yesterday and today. http://pligg-cms.info/story.php?title=student-loan-debt-relief
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DemiGR
http://www.sharklinks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://factson37.com/story.php?title=student-loan-debt-forgiveness-website
http://social-marker.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-debt-forgiveness
http://makingbookmarks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://bookmarkingforseo.com/story.php?title=top-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://jadelinks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options There are quite a bit more and they don't seem to be stopping. All of them look pretty much identical to this. Thoughts?1 -
Keywords in Google Local results
We have a client in the moving business and I'm absolutely flabbergasted by the "local" results and the number of them that are not following Google's guidelines for Google Local accounts. 3 of them are using exact match keyword strings as their company names. I've reported all 3, every week for the last 2 months and have not seen a single dip in the rankings. Meanwhile our client has a duplicate listing we've verified and "suspended" and it hasn't changed for 4 months! Any tips? I've attached a photo of the listings as well. xwWZWyT.gif
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SmartWebPros0 -
Does anyone have any suggestions on removing spammy links?
I have some clients that recently got hit by "Penguin" they have several less than desireable backlinks that could be the issue? Does anyone have any suggestions on getting these removed? What are the odds that a webmaster on these spammy sites are going to remove them, and is it worth the time and effort?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RonMedlin3 -
Link Building: High Ranking Site vs. Relevancy
Hello, When link building, is it acceptable to link with a site that has high authority but has minimal relevancy to our site? For example, if we sell nutritional products and the link exchange would be with a site that relates to free coupons, would that work? Also, if we are publishing articles on other sites, should we also publish them on our own site? Should we add "nofollow" if we publish them in our site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | odegi0 -
Anchor text for internal links
there has been a lof of discussion on this forum and elsewhere about over optimized anchor text, partial match anchor text vs exact anchor text match, etc. I am wondering iwhether or not exact anchor text matches are good or bad for internal links? Does anyone have anythoughts, or better, any studies? Paul
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | diogenes0 -
How does Google rank a websites search queries
Hello, I can't seem to find an answer anywhere. I was wondering how a websites search query keyword string url can rank above other page results that have stronger backlinks. The domain is usually strong, but that url with the .php?search=keyword just seems like it doesn't fit in. How does Google index those search string pages? Is it based off of traffic alone to that url? Because those urls typically don't have backlinks, right? Has anyone tried to rank their websites search query urls ever? I'm just a little curious about it. Thanks everyone. Jesse
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | getrightmusic0 -
Are there any "legitimate" paid links in Google's eyes?
The news about paid link campaigns is so frequent, that I have to ask the question....does Google allow any paid links? Aside from SEO, paid links can have visibility value. Much like an exit sign on the highway, the paid link says "Get off here"
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bcmull0