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Google Doesn’t Hate ALL Paid Links, Just Yours

Posted by jonathan at 9:15am EST on 08/01/2008

Yet another post about paid links. I know, I know, will the madness ever stop? No way! Why would we want to not have something to talk about?

Today’s topic is paid links, search rankings, and sitelinks.

I’ve known about these paid links for a long time and so has Google I’m sure. In this particular example, we will be using phpBB.com as the site in question.

I do have to give credit to the phpBB.com webmasters for actually putting “sponsors” and making it very clear that that they are sponsored links. Even in the html, they use rel=”external sponsor” as part of the href link.

The problem I see here though, is that they are still selling links. Whether someone gave them a really big cup of coffee as a thank you or the companies sponsored a phpBB event, they are still sponsored links. phpBB.com still has a PageRank of 5, when it used to have a PageRank of 9.

I find it slightly ironic that Google will drop some sites completely out of the rankings if they have erroneously hacked links or absolutely nothing wrong with their site, but for a site that is clearly stating that they are selling links, stays at the top of the index for their keywords. Let’s take a look at what the rankings look like for phpBB.com still.

Next, let’s take a look at the search rankings and how Google is treating phpBB.com.

Sure, the search is for phpbb, the domain name, but let’s inspect it a little deeper than just that.

Running the query, we can see that phpbb.com is still the first hit. In fact, aside from clearly having paid links and clearly having their PageRank penalized for having paid links, they remain the first hit with sitelinks. Slightly ironic, again, that Google will still give this domain so authority and respect, despite violating its Webmaster Quality Guidelines. Matt Cutts has come out several times stating that this is a pretty bad thing to do and you’re likely to get kicked out of Google’s index for it.

But thing Matt forgot to mention is that it only depends on how big of site you have. If you have enough backlinks pointing to your site, Google will still rank you and still happily send you traffic.

So what’s the lesson we should learn from this example? Buy as many links as possible and spend as much money as possible to get as many backlinks as possible. Buy enough links and Google will still rank you just like do for phpBB.com.

Thanks for not being a hypocrite Google, we love you!

Incoming search terms:

• rel=external sponsor
• paid links
• google lawsuit over search results September 2011
• want paid for links