I decided to write this article after I have found, read and put together multiple sources of information related to the September-October 2007 Google's PageRank update. The conclusion I came across after the analysis is: Considering the new Google's back link indexation algorithm, buying links for PR becomes worthless.

Let me explain. There are 2 coordinates.

The first is the human fact. Webmasters having now websites with high PR won’t sell links anymore because this is a very risky job for their business and they are aware of this fact. In the same time, webmasters owning low PR websites or pages that were penalized by Google during the last PR update (that is still happening) are also aware it is worthless to buy links. Even if they still have the courage to do this job, it’s more than possible they won’t have where from because the first category of webmasters won’t get into business risking their websites to be penalized. Thus, there is gonna happen a breakage between link sellers and link buyers. Maybe I am wrong but the conclusion above is MY conclusion and it’s a logical one.

The second coordinate is the technical one. How Google detects that links are paid? Well, it’s not too difficult. I recently got across a confidential resource and I wanted to share with you only 3 ideas from there:

1) Paid links are usually shown grouped and eventually separated by common separators like: “
” “,” “;” “|” “-” etc… or even white spaces. Google analyzes these strings and if it finds repeated <a href=…>link</a> {a common separator here( + a possible piece of text)} <a href=…>link</a> {another common separator here( + a possible piece of text)} without the “nofollow” tag, this is a possible paid links case. Moreover, if the “piece of text” is not related to the rest of the text, the possibility of a paid link case increases.

2) A website “A” sold links to “B”, “C” and “D”. Let’s say “A” is content related to “B” and “D” but “C” is not related to “B” and “D” nor to “A”; but “B”, “C” and “D” are in sequence (for example separated by a comma). There are many other combination possibilities. 1) + 2) represent a paid link scenario easy to be detected.

3) Paid links are shown grouped in sections labeled “Sponsored links”, “Partners”, “Related links” or simply labeled “Links”. This possibility combined with 1) and/or 2) above, represents an evidence of paid links.