Paid Links are Alive and Well

A large percentage of web-sites across the Internet suffered a decrease in Google page rank after the recent update. Web and search engine guru’s speculate that site’s buying and selling links endured the majority of the blows. Web surfers might enjoy and even praise Google’s efforts to weed out spam and improve their search engine results, but is the new policy really having an effect?

Consider a relatively popular term that could run into trouble generating natural backlinks. Search for that term in Google and copy the URL of the first result into your clipboard. Visit Yahoo! and search for:

link:paste-url-here.com

Take a look at a few of the sites that link back to our #1 result in Google for the term chosen above. Notice how natural, or unnatural the back links appear? If a backlink doesn’t exist, but Yahoo! says it does, this means there once was a backlink, and was likely purchased for X amount of time. To see this process in action, check out: Paid Links: More effective than ever.

In the underground world of webmasters, this is a big problem. Many sites that once ranked #1 for popular search terms were penalized, and some even deindexed all together. I guess the purpose of this post is to question the effectiveness of these tactics. Some niche’s are extremely difficult to get natural backlinks in. Who wants to link to a car insurance web-site, for free? Will Google’s anti-paid link practice last? Has your site been affected? Share your thoughts below.