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Proof that buying links works

Dave posted earlier today about how Economist.com was selling some high PageRank links. I’ve been looking deeper into the issue and it seems the links are working very well.

If you check out the people buying links at the bottom of the Economist.com homepage and then do some searches on Google.co.uk for the terms they are targeting such as “loans”, “car insurance” and “travel insurance” you can see the sites that have links from economist.com are doing very well, much better than they were doing a few weeks ago.

Most people think you need millions of links to compete for a keyword such as “loans”. In this case it seems like a paid link from a PR8 site will do the job just fine.

My only concern is that this is pretty much a “who’s who” of link buyers that Google could use to hand out penalties. However Google is quite clearly turning a blind eye to link buyers in the UK so it looks like these sites will reap the benefits for a good few months.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 9:39pm ON Tuesday, 22 April 2008

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+

Comments

  • http://www.stephanmiller.com Stephan Miller

    Google also let some people slide on a multitude of things. I was doing research on Filemaker issues and kept hitting a big name tech online learning website whose name is on a lot of the programming books I have here. Only when I got there, the content I was searching for wasn’t there. Obviously they were using cloaking somehow. Letting the spiders through to the paid content, but not letting visitors see it. I am not sure if that has changed yet. It was a while back.

  • http://www.TheMaskedMillionaire.com The Masked Millionaire

    Google is too big. It is their right to be big, but I’m getting tired of them.

  • Luke

    Do you not think that Google will allow sites that pay for links stay at the top if they are relevant and actually doing some good?

  • http://www.chameleonnet.co.uk/seo.aspx D-2point0

    I’ve been doing some link building recently and in my quest have been offered quite a few opportunities to buy links. Whilst I know the short term benefit is great I am still wary that ‘The big G’ will probably detect that it was a bought link.

    I try to remind myself that SEO is a long term arrangement and that genuine links are the best way forward, but it is still tempting!!

    Donna Adams

  • http://www.darlingtonweddings.co.uk Craig

    Economist.com is showing PR5 for me! Google reduced already?

  • http://www.blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

    Interesting. The links still pass weight by the looks of it though – probably not for long.

  • http://www.ithedumb.com dev

    Ask, Altavista and other giants was beaten by GOOG coz they didnt though about “link as a way to judge the quality of page/site”

    at that time link was no business… only geeks appreciating each others work

    but to me, its no more good… in each 1000 word article you have 5-10 links where >10 add links surrounding it….

    i guess its the time for some researcher to come up with a better solution… may be way to distinguish between contents and ads, which is even harder in AJAX world

  • james

    Patrick

    Looks like ASDA’s link aren’t there anymore…

  • Pingback: Has Google canned the Economist in Search Rankings? Blog Platform | The Wardman Wire

  • http://www.portrait-wedding-photographers.co.uk Duncan Malloch

    My site Portrait Wedding Photographers suffers from low backlinks, so I have looked at ways of increasing these. Paid link seem to be an easy way out, if you have the money! But it could be risky, as it has been indicated here, Google take a dim view of paid for links. So be careful!

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