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Hi Bryan,

Thanks for that. I've just been reading a thread from 2009 on which Rand posted some views on the difference between Paid Links and text Link Ads.

I suppose its hard to distinguish the difference between the two, but its clear in this particular case that the links have been bought, and aren't really for advertising purposes!

Its incredibly frustrating, but I suppose maybe in the long term they'll get punished. Who knows?!

Thanks anyway

I've recently started working with a travel company - and finding the general link building side of the business quite difficult.

I had a call from an SEO firm the other day offering their services, and stating that they had worked with a competitor of ours and delivered some very good results. I checked the competitors rankings, PR, link profile, and indeed, the results were quite impressive.

However, the link profile pointed to one thing, that was incredibly obvious. They had purchased a large amount of sidebar text links from powerful blogs in the travel sector.

Its painfully obvious what has happened, yet they still rank very highly for a lot of key terms.

Why don't Google do something about this? They aren't the only company in this sector doing this, but it just seems pointless for white hats trying to do things properly, then those with the dollar in their pockets just buy success in the SERPS.

Thanks

Hi Bryan,

Thanks for that. I've just been reading a thread from 2009 on which Rand posted some views on the difference between Paid Links and text Link Ads.

I suppose its hard to distinguish the difference between the two, but its clear in this particular case that the links have been bought, and aren't really for advertising purposes!

Its incredibly frustrating, but I suppose maybe in the long term they'll get punished. Who knows?!

Thanks anyway