Zoekmachine optimalisatie tips

We now have ourselves a brand new Google penalty: the paid links penalty. Now every website who sells or buys textlinks for Pagerank (that means without a nofollow) gets penalized with a lower pagerank. Well, I say, like good old Metallica used to say: "So What!". But when you're earning money from selling links on your high pagerank websites you'll probably do care!

Many big SEO authorities are hit because of this penalty. Not all of them sell links for pagerank but they do have a certain opinion about it. To me this seems done manually by Google. But what took them so long? Isn't it a press on a button to lower someones pagerank? Back in 2005 Matt Cutts already warned us for selling links without a nofollow (note to Matt: sorry, after seeing this update, I'm not taking any chances anymore, your link just got nofollowed). But over two years later they finally did something about it! What took them so long? Did they need that time to program an algorithm for this self-created 'bug'?

Ivo pointed out to me in the dutch version of this post that Vanessa Fox posted a blog item about this in the Official Google Webmasters Central Blog. They told us the following:
Today, in response to your request, we're providing a paid links reporting form within Webmaster Tools. To use the form, simply log in and provide information on the sites buying and selling links for purposes of search engine manipulation. We'll review each report we get and use this feedback to improve our algorithms and improve our search results. in some cases we may also take individual action on sites.

They might take individual action on some sites (like the SEO authorities?), but they also use our feedback to improve their algorithms. So I think it took them so long because they wanted to first have the algorithm and then also penalize the authorities who sell links, to let us know they're serious. But what about that algorithm? How the hell can Google take a look in someone elses wallet?

Well, you can recognize paid links by their characteristics. Here's a little list to get you started: (of coarse not every characteristic has to be applicable to every paid link, these are only general)

• Irrelevant to the subject of the site the link is on.
• No linkcondom (rel="nofollow").
• They're often in a list on the lower/side part of the site.
• They're often site wide links.
• Imagine a website who has 10 site wide backlinks, 8 of them are PR8. Paid or not paid?
• They're often on a sponsored page, or the heading of the list of paid links is sponsored links, advertisers, ads or something like that.
• Weird linkbuilding, if the link doesn't look natural, it's probably bought.
• Does a website comply to some of the above, then the chances are quite good there are more paid links on that site, do those also comply with most of the characteristics above? Then you're almost sure the links are paid
• Penalize the site and see what happens, do the links go away after a while? Then they're probably paid.

You can even go deeper on this, let's say site A buys links, Google doesn't know that. But Google sees a link that complies with most of the characteristics of a paid link. Google digs deeper to see if other backlinks of that site also have these characteristics, if so, penalize the bastards!

This way they solved the problem they originally created themselves by introducing pagerank. The paid links don't count for the advertisers website anymore, and the pagerank of the link selling website goes down, so the advertisers walk away.

Then there could be an aftermath, do the links disappear after the pagerank dropped? If yes, then they were probably bought for the pagerank.