Brian Chappell

Google goes after link buyers – not impressed

By Brian Chappell on March 24, 2008

UPDATE:

After further notice it appears to be somewhat algorithmic in nature, and somewhat manual. Some sites I have noticed have gotten completely docked, and some sites have only had penalizations at the page level. Will keep an eye on this as it unfolds.

I talked to Matt Cutts, and he explained that if you are trying to recoup some of your lost rankings, then the best course of action is to get the paid links removed by contacting the site owners and telling them to take them down. Once you have made a good faith effort of removing the links then they might consider the reconsideration request.

Not sure how feasible it is to get this done, but this is what he said none the less.

It looks like Google has finally started pushing, what appears to be in typical “scalable” fashion, a paid link algorithm that is completely knocking out pages (not entire sites) that it feels have been heavily gamed via paid links.

This is going to open up a whole new can of worms, and will be interesting to watch how it unfolds in the coming weeks and months. Competitor sabotage here we come?