Link Buying Penalty By Google That Cost $4 Million Dollars
September 2, 2010 by Pablo Palatnik
We all know the dangers of buying links…it may even be taboo right now. Tell a webmaster you want to buy a link and he just may tell you to go to the back of the bar, and he’ll meet you out in 10. It’s a big NO NO for Google and it says so in their guidelines for search.
Do all webmaster abide by this rule? Of course not. Should they? PROBABLY. We work so hard to rank our websites that a Google penalty can literally throw it all out the window. That is our biggest fear and the main reason most of us don’t engage in link buying. Nevertheless, I am not against selling or buying links that may be for other purposes besides SEO. Let’s say there is a great piece of content on a website and there is a keyword that can link back to your website. What is so wrong with the person taking their time to write this great piece of content link back for some cash? Don’t all journalist, from all publications that are considered a business (newspapers, magazines, etc) write knowing their paychecks are coming from advertising?
Ryan Abood, founder and owner of GourmetGiftBaskets.com experienced first hand what it is to be hit with a Google penalty and the big cost and impact it can have on your business. As he explains in the latest INC article, a penalty un-indexed his website from the engine and 80% of his traffic was gone from one day to the next resulting in a serious loss of revenue.
Nevertheless, if you read the article, it does have a happy ending. Google does have a re-inclusion forum where as he states, “We call it the Google confessional. We said, “These are the links that were paid; these are the links that weren’t paid. We’ve obviously violated your trust, and we’re taking steps to remedy it.”
Also, from this story as well as many others, we always see the positive side of a mishap such as this.
Comments (3)
Umm, buying advertising space, be it image, flash, or text link ads has been around since the webs inception. The fact that one search engines algorithm can not handle it because they are dumb enough to base rankings on links without consideration of a standard in advertising does not make it bad, it makes them idiots.
It also makes those that follow behind them preaching this malarkey worse.
Willam I agree with you. I think this is all a tactic by the Google Spam team to prevent those webmaster trying to sell links to others in order to ‘try’ and stop those wanting to ‘manipulate’ the search engine. Nevertheless, it has been around forever and till this day people are buying links…for the right reasons too as well most of the time.
I don’t know of anyone being penalized for link buying or how they figure this out. The only way I can see it being slightly obvious is buying a link from a totally unrelated site, even that would be hard to tell.
I also agree with William, Pablo. I’ve purchased a few links from related niches in order to drive more traffic but also for SEO purposes.