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
-
Nofollow for reciprocal links?
Hi, We have reciprocal links with our business partners. Their websites have been listed on our website with "nofollow" links and they link to our website with "nofollow" or "dofollow" links. Is this wrong having reciprocal links? And if they are our partners, "nofollow" or "dofollow" is better? I don't think there will be anymore link juice loss with dofollow links from our website?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Dealing with links to your domain that the previous owner set up
Hey everyone, I rebranded my company at the end of last year from a name that was fairly unique but sounded like I cleaned headstones instead of building websites. I opted for a name that I liked, it reflected my heritage - however it also seems to be quite common. Anyway, I registered the domain name as it was available as the previous owner's company had been wound up. It's only been in the last week or two where I've managed to have a website on that domain and I've been tracking it's progress through Moz, Google & Bing Webmaster tools. Both the webmaster tools are reporting back that my site triggers 404 errors for some specific links. However, I don't have or have never used those links before. I think the previous owner might have created the links before he went bust. My question is in two parts. The first part is how do I find out what websites are linking to me with these broken URL's, and the second is will these 404'ing links affect my SEO? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mickburkesnr0 -
2015 Bing Disavow, should i copy and paste from Google?
So I just submitted my 2nd disavow file to Google, but what about Bing? I know i would have to submit one url at a time, but is it worth it? Is it safe yet to submit the same file from Google? I know Bing measures quantity of links and submitting the same file might hurt my rankings, but anything new in 2015?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Shawn1240 -
It's not link buying, but...
Which of these strategies, if any, cross the line from relationship building to link buying? Assume all links are do-follow. You're a local business. You give the local Boys & Girls club a few hundreds buck a year. In return, you get a very nice link on their Sponsorship page for 12 months. You send a sample of your product to influential bloggers, for the purpose of a review and hopefully a link back to your website. One of your clients is a college bar. You invite 50 college kids over for a slow evening and stuff them full of chicken wings. Then, you ask them to please review and link to the bar on their college wiki. You give a client a free service, in exchange for that client linking to your business on its blog roll. You take a blogger out to lunch, and pick up the tab. Later that day, the blogger writes up an amusing little story for the blog, and links back to your desired website. In your email newsletter, you put out a request to your customer base, "Please link to my website, and I'll provide you a special 20% off coupon."
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ExploreConsulting1 -
Negative SEO attack working amazingly on Google.ca
We have a client www.atvandtrailersales.com who recently (March) fell out of the rankings. We checked their backlink file and found over 100 spam links pointing at their website with terms like "uggboots" and "headwear" etc. etc. I submitted a disavow link file, as this was obviously an attack on the website. Since the recent Panda update, the client is back out of the rankings for a majority of keyword phrases. The disavow link file that was submitted back in march has 90% of the same links that are still spamming the website now. I've sent a spam report to Google and nothing has happened. I could submit a new disavow link file, but I'm not sure if this is worth the time. '.'< --Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SmartWebPros1 -
Link worth?
These are not my links but does anyone know what the value of one link from something like below is (bio or body) http://designwebkit.com/web-and-trends/how-many-fonts-designer-really-need/ www.thebuildingblox.com/termite-turmoil-how-to-identify-and-remedy-the-problem/ http://creativeoverflow.net/the-10-best-alternatives-to-dropbox/ in comparison with links from below www.01fangchan.com
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson
www.1.inerdentos.ru
www.1000empregos.com
www.1stdirectory.co.uk
www.2halsi.com
www.3dir.co.uk
www.514friends.com
www.57billion.com We disavowed around a 1000 links of the above quality (crap) and need to rebuild decent quality links and i would just like to know what the guess is on how many links such as below would need to be built to compensate for the loss. http://designwebkit.com/web-and-trends/how-many-fonts-designer-really-need/ vs www.01fangchan.com Would need to replace 1000.0 -
Does Google+ make a huge difference?
I run a website that's been ranked well for good keywords related to our business for some time. It was founded back in 2007 and has been there a while. Recently a new site has popped up that ranks brilliantly for everything. It's a new site, and the only redeeming factor I can see is that it has an AddThis box showing the Facebook Likes and Google Plus Ones, and they are around 400 Facebook Likes and 80 Google+ (for every page that ranks). Any other pages on their site which doesn't have any Facebook likes or Google Plus Ones, they don't rank. Our site doesn't have any likes or pluses. Is this making the difference? I stress that other than this our sites are very similar, other than the fact we've been around over 5 years.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | freebetinfo0 -
Link Building: Location-specific pages
Hi! I've technically been a member for a few years, but just recently decided to go Pro (and I gotta say, I'm glad I did!). Anyway, as I've been researching and analyzing, one thing I noticed a competitor is doing is creating location-specific pages. For example, they've created a page that has a URL similar to this: www.theirdomain.com/seattle-keyword-phrase They have a few of these for specific cities. They rank well for the city-keyword combo in most cases. Each city-specific page looks the same and the content is close to being the same except that they drop in the "seattle keyword phrase" bit here and there. I noticed that they link to these pages from their site map page, which, if I were to guess, is how SEs are getting to those pages. I've seen this done before on other sites outside my industry too. So my question is, is this good practice or is it something that should be avoided?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AngieHerrera0