Paid Links – A really stupid thing to do
I was looking over some paid links today from a company that you can buy links from. The company uses a combination of their own sites and contacting site owners offering them money for placing links on their sites.
Here’s the stupid bit, 5 different sites had placed the link in a div called “{companyname}-paid-links”. So why go to all the effort of setting up the links and then make them traceable to Google. They may as well stick a big arrow on the page saying “yup Google paid links over here”. Once they get the name of the div all Google’s spam team need to do is search sites for div’s called “{companyname}-paid-links”.
It’s same as using hidden text and calling the div “hiddencontent”.
The moral of the story if your going to do paid links, which might not be the option anyway then don’t make it easy for Google to pick up on them, place them in articles, if you have a network of site host them separately and use different names when registering the domains!
