How long will people be able to buy their way to the top of Google?
 

It seems like all anyone does these days is throw up a page and buy a bunch of links to it and get top placement in google, despite googles stance against it.

How long do you think this can go on?

Until Google finds a way to monetize it themselves?

As long as money talks. Capitalism, you know.

They need to put into place a report that they can look at & see what domains jumped up in inbound links from the previous crawl.

But, then again, they also need to put a linkbot in there to catch 302's & 404's.

I didn't know that was still possible

What pissed me off about google was when I got back in the business I was looking for TGPs to submit galleries to, and if you do a keyword search for TGP mostly all you find are CJ sites.

Guys, guys, guys...I am almost embarrassed by some of these responses - Google isn't making a dime from this. Almost everyone with a top listing for short-tail adult terms got there by buying links.

This flies in the face of Google policy:
http://www.google.com/support/webmas...n&answer=66736

What I can't believe is how fuckers are getting away with it.

You can report link by logging into your webmaster tools:
www.google.com/webmaster/ (you have to be logged in)

And another that looked for the same jump 2 years ago.

That's why I said UNTIL Google finds a way to monetize it themselves. I am almost embarrassed by your response.

To play the devil's advocate:

* buying links is no different from what's always been happening in link trading: an exchange of value. Instead of trading traffic and link juice, people who buy links have just formalized the arrangement by putting a dollar value on the trades and making them one way.

* most of the sites in the top of the serps buying links are actually pretty good sites that offer what the surfer wants... at least, they're no worse than the rest of the crap filling up the adult serps. The bottom line is that most adult sites aren't actually very good.

* it's actually pretty difficult to differentiate between discrete bought and organic links. If I get listed on a social bookmarking site then I'll see a rapid surge in backlinks in a way similar to lots of paid links coming in. You also can't really punish people for buying even tangentally related text links - it's just another media buy.

I personally am a miser and so am not into buying links, but I just view it as part of the maturation of the SEO industry. You can't stop it.

Hasn't that always been an option? I know I purchased my way to #1 for a key word around 2004. It was a whole $50 then.

It will probably go on until Google uses traffic analysis to drive search results, based on what it sees for toolbar and Google Analytics usage.

I get the suspicious feeling that Google is already doing this at least in small part.

Oh please...are you telling me all those people selling backlinks (people that rank high on Google, btw) are selling for the sole purpose of advertising? I read the forums, and I read the ads..people are buying and selling for pagerank and seo.

Google may not be making $, but somebody sure as hell is...so yeah, money talks.

I agree with asianslave.
A LinkList owner may not like it, but google is clearly states that excessive reciprocal link exchange is considered as LinkSchemes which is indented to boost your site ranking.

http://google.com/support/webmasters...y?answer=66356

We all know that LinkLists demand reciprocal links for boosting the ranking in search engines. So are those guys who are buying links.

This trend only stop when google starts giving equal importance to the content on page and probably some way of user rating (which google is already doing with iGoogle).

Or maybe actual surfer ranking based on SERP clicks.

Links in Google SERPs change on click
Google's onclick SERP tracking has been around for a long time. I think there was even a deconstruction of it on the WebmasterWorld few years ago.

Recently, they changed the redirects at /url to be client-side, rather than server-side, for a significant proportion of users - and went as far as announcing this publicly.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3918680.htm