There are two major reasons why you should make this switch, one of which is more obvious than the other:

1. The search engines are gunning for you. The paid link does not add value to their algorithm. Links are not useful as a ranking factor if they aren’t freely given as true endorsements. They just aren’t. So they want to discount them. The impact of this is that once your paid links are discovered, your investment becomes a waste of time and $$$.

2. You don’t get ahead. Regardless of what you spend per month for the links you have now, you have to keep spending it just to stay in the same spot. Even that is not a given if your competitor gets more aggressive than you and passes you. Organic links are the gift that keeps on giving. No monthly spend and constant value without risk. Does it cost money to build organic links? Of course it does, you need to do the right things (create content & promote the site) for that to happen, but the money you spend each month grows your link profile, instead of just maintaining it.

First Stage: Assessing Your Situation

Start by getting a handle on your particular situation.

For example, if you have 1,000 backlinks and 900 of them are paid for, you are in a tough spot. Weaning off the links can still be done but you need to go more slowly. These are the main things I would look at:

1. Total volume of paid links. More links means more work to do, but you do need to know what the task is before you start!
2. % of total links which are paid. The larger the percentage the more careful you need to be in making the transition. However, the larger the percentage, the more urgent it is to get started!
3. Total monthly spent on paid links. This is the money you can save by unloading those paid links. It is also the money you can invest in developing organic links going forward.
4. Determining which ones are providing the most value. You won’t know for sure, but you can probably come pretty close to figuring this out.
5. Determine which ones are adding the least value. These are the easiest one to dump, so they will go first!

Getting Link Data

Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools both offer ways to get a view to seeing what the search engines have for links for your site. This is great data. To get at this in Google’s Webmaster Tools, just click on the links as shown in this screen shot in order from top to bottom:

When you have gotten to that screen, scroll to the bottom and then click on Download all Links as shown in this screen shot:

Bing also allows you to download all your links. To get to the report, follow the click path from top to bottom shown in this screenshot:

When you get there, click on “Export All” which is over on the right side of the screen as shown here:

Sadly, Yahoo! will soon no longer be an option as Yahoo! Site Explorer will be closed down before year’s end. Fortunately, we do have two other great tools we can use. These are Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO. Both of these require cash to use, but give you a great deal of visibility on links to your site. You can also use them to review links to other people’s sites, and with Yahoo! Site Explorer going away, they will be the best two options for doing that.

With all of these options, you will get a representative list of links to your site. Unforunately, no tool will show you all your links, for various reasons. For Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO, the process of crawling the Web is a very expensive proposition, and each does the best they can. For the search engines, which obviously have much larger budgets to pay for their crawls, they have their own reasons for not showing you more data.

In the end, you need to pick the tool that is most comfortable for you. I like Open Site Explorer because it gives me the cleanest metrics for valuing the inbound links, as you can see in this screen shot:

With this, you can analyze the value of the inbound links you have received. I tend to weight Domain Authority more than I do Page Authority. So I start by sorting the output by Domain Authority in descending order and then by Page Authority in descending order.

Once I have done that, I filter out the organic links in the list, since I am analyzing paid links. After that, there are still a couple of key things to watch for:

• Filter out NoFollowed links, as these will not be perceived as link manipulation. If you want to keep those links, go for it!
• For some domains, the Domain Authority is irrelvant. For example, a link in the Yahoo! Directory is not likely to be valued based on the Domain Authority of Yahoo! overall. Similarly, a link from Blogspot.com is based on a decision made by an individual blogger, not the management team of the company.
• While I to lean towards Domain Authority, take into account Page Authority as well. So I might weight a Domain/Page Authority of 75/55 over a Domain/Page Authority of 85/25.
• Consider the relevance. Simply put, relevant links are worth more.

Second Stage: Making The Plan

Now that you have your raw data you need to make your plan. This is the fun part! I help clients with this process often, and it is exciting to transition your marketing efforts to a more solid and secure plan to build your business. Here are some things to do when thinking about this:

1. Plan on losing the low value links first. The reasons for this are simple: lower risk and it frees up money to invest in the rest of the plan. This is a great step which is designed to help you build momentum.
2. Build your plan for organic links. This could really be its own book, so I will just touch on this briefly here. Focus on very high value links. You can get some ideas on how to do it from the Link Building Presentation I did at SMX Advanced.
3. Develop a timeline for the addition of organic links. Decide what you are willing to commit resource wise to get this done, and make an estimate for how quickly you think you will be able to obtain these links.
4. Decide on a rough timeline for losing the paid links. You need to decide on this part of the plan based on your plan for adding new organic links and your growth goals during the transition process.

Finally, Commit!

The most important reason for making a plan is that it puts you in a better spot to respond to change. In this plan, be prepared to adapt based on your experiences. If you are adding organic links at a faster than expected rate, you may want to speed up the deletion of the paid ones. Of course, if you are having trouble getting the high value organic links, it may take longer to dump the paid ones than planned to.

Whatever happens though, don’t lose your commitment to see this through. It is definitely worth it. The process of building organic links is a different one, and it will force you to sit back and think about your website differently. After all, why would someone give you that link?

You will need to solve this problem, if you haven’t already, in the very near future. Search engines are actively reassessing the role of links in their algorithms. Links are not going to go away as a ranking factor, but their importance will be adjusted. We know that social factors are already a component, and their role will probably increase. The same is true for factors like content quality and user engagement.

These other factors are going to place a lot more demand on the quality of experience you provide on your site. The sooner you get focused on that, the better!

Here is a sample of the email notification from Google:

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.domain.com/,

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

As you can see, the key distinction here between the January notification and this notification are the words “unnatural links pointing to your site” versus “unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites.” As you can see, Google is telling webmasters that their site has been penalized because they have bad links, maybe paid links or other unnatural links, pointing to your site.

Google began its campaign against paid links in October 2007 and has continued the fierce campaign since then.

Related Articles:

• Google Adding New Spam Warnings In Webmaster Tools
• Google Adds Site Hacked Notifications To Search Results
• Google Webmaster Tools SiteNotices For Site Error Notifications
• Google Notifying Webmasters To Update WordPress Blogs
• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google

If webmasters didn’t ask for money, we wouldn’t buy links. If no one offered money though, webmasters wouldn’t ask for it. It’s the chicken or the egg, all over again.

The recent Harvard porn links outing is just one of many high-profile outing stories but it’s one that really hits home because hey, it’s Harvard!

It’s Harvard hosting links to pornographic sites on what is supposed to be a pristine .edu domain, the gold standard of great links. It’s Harvard having redirects that take you to a porn site when you click on a seemingly harmless URL in their search results.

I know how this happens because, like you, I suspect that someone is using less-than-stellar link building practices. Also, I’ve seen tons of examples that show how amazingly simple it is to place links on .edu sites, whether through buying them or taking advantage of open-source platforms like Joomla and WordPress in order to inject spammy links.

Just for fun, I looked at a few other .edu sites, and on every one, I found what I’d consider to be paid or spammy links. Now, many people would argue that any paid link is spammy, but I don’t always agree with that. Some paid links are nicely done and relevant, but a spammy link is one that obviously is completely irrelevant to the page and only there in order to make you click and go to the desired target.

Students are oftentimes desperate for money, and they’re enjoying the first taste of freedom by raging against the machine. Selling space on a student page at their university seems like a fairly harmless way to stick it to the man and get more money for beer or textbooks or rent.

Then again you have the injected spammy links, which are most likely just the results of link spammers who simply know how to do it. They do this on all types of sites, not just .edu domains, but I do have to think that most people doing any sort of link building know just how good the .edu link juice tastes.

It’s also a common practice to build links by offering “sponsorships” for university clubs, especially the really boring ones that have 3 members. The reality is, it’s frighteningly easy to buy links from students who have access to space on a .edu. What’s shocking to me is that this is only coming to the general public’s attention now, after years of abuse.

Here are just three of the types of paid/spammy links that I found:

1. The “Research Page” link. This link is on an Ivy League school’s domain, courtesy of a money-hungry student who wanted some help funding one of his research projects. The only clever part of his paragraph of links is that the 4 sites he links to have 4 unique ip addresses.

2. The “obviously a presell page” link. Also on the domain of an even more prestigious Ivy League school, this page only exists in order to link to a gambling site.

3. The “this is just the kind of thing I like linking to!” link. Ah, the student homepage…full of links, all apparently just things the student webmasters enjoys! He enjoys everything from designer paper supplies to organic dog treats.

Yes, this is what the link economy has given us. Anything can be gamed in some way. It’s not just the industries which have the potential to offend that are doing it, either. It’s anyone who realizes that students will sell link space.

Who Is To Blame For The Link Economy?

Some say that Google has created this nightmare themselves. Some blame agencies and link builders who are willing to buy links. Some blame clients who want to take what they consider to be the easy way out, unfairly competing with others who play by the rules. I think it’s all of those.

Google’s attempts to curb the practice of buying links aren’t working, which is why we’re seeing so many high-profile outings. People are disgusted with Google not taking care of the unfair advantage a site owner with loads of cash has over his competitors.

Plus, and this is always important, people like to think they’ve found something that hasn’t yet been found. It wasn’t news to any link builder that I know that JCPenney was buying links. Harvard’s website hosting these questionable links is no different. It’s the general public who is shocked by something that we consider to be just the way it is.

Now since Harvard has been publicly outed and discussed, I decided that it wouldn’t violate my principles to dig into their outgoing links even further in order to check on another industry frequently accused of pushing spam…yes, pharmacy. (Thanks to Michelle Robbins for the idea, by the way.)

Since Stephen Chapman, the SEO Whistleblower at ZDNet, has already opened up this can of worms and showed you exactly how he found this stuff, I have no problems just furthering it. I’m just applying his same search methods to show you that this problem is not strictly related to porn, so you can go do your own research and type in viagra, cialis, cash advance, payday loans, etc.

You’ll find results, unless they fix all of this before you have the chance. Just in case, check out this nice Viagra page on the Harvard domain…

Here’s the really spammy bit of this though. If you click on the result you go to the target page (for a second or two) then get redirected to a site selling, yes, Viagra. Yikes. I mean yes, it’s obvious that if you click on that result, you’re going to a Viagra-related bit of content, but you do expect to stay on the Harvard site, do you not?

And horribly enough, this Viagra link was (and I say was because after I screenshotted it and went back to it, it had been removed) listed in the right nav with other links for this doctor such as Curriculum Vitae. Quality stuff.

However, when I discussed this example with Debra Mastaler she pointed out that the person whose page these links are on may not control the page and may have no clue. That honestly would not surprise me. However, it did look like this:

As you can see, this has serious potential for messing with someone’s credibility. Is this really how we want to build links, even in ultra-competitive industries?

What about payday loans? Yep, they’re there too.

The bottom line here is that it’s incredibly easy to obtain links from the more noble sites. So far, we’ve also seen a giant retailer outed and seen the same thing happen to a florist. This stuff is everywhere — so what do you do? Report it to the webmaster, especially if you think it’s an injected link? Report it to Google? Contact the media? Out them on your website? Grin and bear it?

As Adam Audette pointed out, tattling seems to be the new way to compete. As you know, once a high-profile outing occurs, it makes Google look like their algorithm isn’t working properly in order to weed out the crap, so they are forced to do something about it. A manual review/slap seems to be what it takes to clean up the results.

What Is The Solution To This Problem?

People won’t stop offering money for links any more than webmasters will stop taking payments. People won’t stop injecting links when these free blogging platforms are hackable, either.

If you’ve ever done anything less than white hat, you’ll know that there’s a way to game just about anything. Should SEOs stop approaching .edu sites with cash offers for links? What about the non-paid links that appear? What if a student does truly like a certain brand and links to it? That’s completely feasible, but the witchhunt isn’t yet interested in those kinds of links, as they are not juicy enough to write about.

Maybe certain industries aren’t yet buying or injecting links on student pages, of course. Maybe big brands are doing it but have the wherewithal to make those links look perfectly natural. I also know for a fact that you can indeed hide the fact that a link has been bought, so I imagine that it’s easy to do some much better link injections than the ones that I’ve seen thus far. Porn, pharmacy, and payday loans catch our eye immediately though.

J.C. Penney appears to be back in Google’s good graces after a 90-day penalty that removed the retailer from appearing prominently in Google’s search results for both short- and long-tail phrases.

The company has regained first- and second-page rankings on a number of terms that were mentioned in a New York Times exposé of Penney’s search rankings and the tactics used to get them — tactics that violated Google’s guidelines.

Two recent reports offer visual evidence of J.C. Penney’s return to Google’s good graces:

First, SEO Clarity says it’s been tracking more than 2,000 JCP-related keywords. As you see on the chart above, the company jumped from 24 keywords in Google’s top ten on May 10th to 899 keywords in the top ten. (See the green line.) The chart also shows JCP increasing its number of Top 3 and Top Position keywords.

Second, Searchmetrics shared a chart last week showing J.C. Penney’s return to visibility in their proprietary “Organic Performance Index.”

J.C. Penney’s Keywords & Rankings

The New York Times article specifically listed close to a dozen keywords on which J.C. Penney had been ranking before they contacted Google and showed Google what they were planning to write about. The article points out, for example, that JCP ranked No. 1 for “Samsonite carry on luggage” — ahead of the official Samsonite website — then dropped to No. 71 when Google applied its penalty. Likewise, JCP dropped from No. 1 to No. 68 for the phrase “living room furniture.”

But, after doing Google searches this morning for all of the phrases mentioned in the Times’ article, the search results seem to confirm the reports above. Here’s a look at current rankings for the terms that the Times mentioned:

Back on Page 1: “skinny jeans,” “comforter sets,” “table cloths,” “grommet top curtains,” “samsonite carry on luggage,” and “living room furniture”

Back on Page 2: “dresses,” “bedding,” and “area rugs”

It’s not all wine-and-roses yet for JCP, though. Based on my searching, the company hasn’t cracked the top 50 yet for “furniture” — one of the terms that the Times said JCP was “at or near the top in searches.”

What Did J.C. Penney Do?

As the Times reported back in February, J.C. Penney immediately fired its search marketing firm, SearchDex. JCP also said it would work to remove the paid links that violated Google’s guidelines. Indeed, all of the links that the Times listed are now gone.

But, SEO Clarity’s report also mentions that J.C. Penney is in the process of rewriting all of its URLs. Older, short URLs — like this one, http://www.jcpenney.com/products/Cga30839.jsp, for “skinny jeans” — now redirect to JCP’s home page. The new URL for “skinny jeans” is much longer and not so SEO-friendly:

http://www.jcpenney.com/jcp/XGN.aspx?DeptID=70656&CatID=71641&SO=0&Ne=29+3+1011+593+8+1031+586+18+904+833+949 &shopperType=G&N=4294953666+4294951278&Nao=0&PSO=0&x5view=1 &CmCatId=70656|71641&SelDim=1011~

Coincidentally, all of JCP’s regained rankings continue to show the older, shorter URLs:

That seems to suggest that J.C. Penney hasn’t regained its search visibility based on Google recrawling its content and any automated changes, but instead based on the lifting of JCP’s manual penalty.

And it was just a couple months ago that Google officially explained how and when ranking penalties are removed — including the fact that manual penalties are often put in place for a fixed length of time.

In J.C. Penney’s case, it looks like that penalty was 90 days. We contacted Google for comment and/or confirmation that JCP’s penalty had been lifted, but got no reply.

UPDATE, May 25: During a live webchat, Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed that J.C. Penney’s penalty was lifted after 90 days. See our full story here.

J.C. Penney store image via Flickr user “vanherdehaage”, used under Creative Commons license.

The story covers how top web sites that rank for search terms related to online flowers sales also appear to have purchased links. The names large brands such as Teleflora, FTD, 1800Flowers.com and ProFlowers as doing this.

The reporter sent a list of 6,000 links (apparently paid links, though this isn’t clear) that these companies acquired over a month’s time to Google. Google replied that the links had virtually no impact on the rankings of those sites. No impact to boost or even degrade the rankings of those sites.

Google told the NY Times:

None of the links shared by The New York Times had a significant impact on our rankings, due to automated systems we have in place to assess the relevance of links. As always, we investigate spam reports and take corrective action where appropriate.

Google added in this statement that they do not always penalize for paid links but rather ensure those paid links have little to no effect on the overall rankings.

When the NY Times exposed J.C. Penney for their link schemes earlier this year, J.C. Penney received a harsh manual penalty. But when it comes to hurting these online flower retailers, the week prior to Mother’s Day, Google did not lift a finger – at least not yet.

I personally love the statement from Teleflora saying that its “corporate policy is to not pay for any links that would violate Google’s guidelines:

After closely reviewing the Teleflora links you provided, we believe we are in compliance with Google.”

Oh, so they have a policy to pay for links that do not violate Google’s guidelines? Aren’t all paid links against Google’s guidelines?

For more of our coverage on paid links, paid link penalties and Google even penalizing themselves for links – see our stories below.

Related Stories:

• New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business
• Google Penalizes Google Japan For Buying Links
• Another Company Outed for Paid Links: Sequoia-Backed Milanoo
• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
• Time For Google To Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links?
• Can You Spot The Paid Link?
• The Big Paid Link Debate Roundup
• The 2007 Paid Links War, In Review
• Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker

Sound familiar? This feels like deja vu except with the name J.C. Penney replaced with Milanoo. Both TechCrunch and Digital Due Diligence do a great job of illustrating the links that appear to be spammy so I won’t recount that here. (And in my J.C. Penney story, I did a rundown of what paid links are and why Google doesn’t like them, so check that out if you want more details.)

So what’s the story here? All kinds of sites — big and small, public and VC-backed — violate search engine guidelines all the time in an attempt to rank more highly through manipulating the search algorithms. Google has a large spam team devoted to uncovering these violations (through both manual and automated means) and is demoting and banning sites daily. This cat and mouse game has been going on since the early days of search and will continue for as long as there’s money to be made in ranking well.

Why Would a Venture Capital firm Invest in Spamming?

From the perspectives of TechCrunch and Digital Due Diligence, the story seems to be that a venture-backed company would engage in such behavior. Didn’t Sequoia do any due diligence? Why didn’t they uncover this themselves? And if they did, why did they go ahead with the investment?

I have no idea what went on with this particular deal, of course. So stepping away from the particulars and looking away from Sequoia and looking instead at the VC community generally, I have talked to a lot of start ups who have been funded from a wide variety of VCs over the years. I do know that some VCs aren’t super savvy with organic search to the point that they would know to look for paid links.  Some start ups are trying to game the system because they think better traffic (and Alexa and Quantcast…) numbers will make them a more attractive investment.

Once a company gets funding, the board looks closely at metrics. I’ve heard stories of boards judging performance on crazy metrics like PageRank scores. Sometimes startups get fixated on showing short term growth rather than long term sustainability.

And certainly it’s the case that not everyone (including some VCs) thinks white hat methods are the way to go. I’ve heard some tell me that it’s their business responsibility to get more customers and revenue via any means at their disposal. Even methods that violate webmaster guidelines? Sure.

Let me be clear — I’m not at all saying that Sequoia has this mindset. In fact, I would be very surprised if that were the case. My limited interactions with them regarding search have always led me to believe that they advocate long-term, sustainable white hat methods.  But it has not been my experience that VC-backed companies generally are more likely than others to avoid black hat SEO methods.

Which leads us to another reason this story may be news. Spammy techniques work.

Can’t Google Catch Spam?

Danny Sullivan tweeted about this story: “nope paid links totally don’t work. google catches them. oops, it doesn’t.” This is the other refrain we hear when situations like this come to light. Why didn’t Google catch this? If this behavior is spammy and risky, why is it working?

I also hear this a lot from companies who are white hat and see their competitors rise above them in the search results using back hat methods. When I tell VC-backed startups who want to start embarking on these methods that putting the company at risk of dropping out of Google search results is no way to run a long term business, they sometimes tell me I’m being naive. It works. They won’t get caught. They’re too small/big/clever/light-shade-of-gray.

So what is the deal?

Yes, it sucks that these techniques sometimes work, especially if you are a searcher and have to wade through spam or your company is getting outranked by a spammy competitor. But here’s the thing. Google really does catch this stuff all the time. Daily. They just aren’t publishing blog posts about it every time. Should they do better? Of course, but they’ll never catch 100% of it.

When a story like this comes out that shows that paid links are working, that doesn’t mean Google doesn’t catch paid links. It means those paid links potentially are temporarily working right now for this site.  Google is catching paid links all time. Would it ever have caught these links? I have no idea. Probably. Maybe not.

Are those startups who tell me I’m being naive and they will never suffer consequences for black hat methods right? Maybe. It’s possible they’ll never get caught. But I get calls and emails every single week from companies who have been caught and have lost all of their incoming traffic.

And you can believe Google’s spam engineers aren’t just hanging out on their bouncy colorful balls drinking wheat grass from the Google cafe. I mean, yes, they are doing those things. But that wheat grass is only making their crazy smart PhD brains even smarter. And they’ll keep evolving their methods of catching this kind of spam.

Related Posts

• New York Times Exposes Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock and Forbes Latest Casualties

It’s one of those “not sure why I do this, but it works for me” kind of things. For example, I work from home a lot. I have peace and quiet and I get more done here than at the office. It’s functional for me. It may irritate my staff, but hey, it works for me.

Online marketing is no different. There really is no one-size-fits-all approach outside of the absolute basics. Yes, you should indeed have a well-optimized site in terms of SEO, you should grab your social media profiles (even if for no other reason than to keep someone else from using them poorly), and you should build links to your site. However, how we do these things is variable depending upon a variety of factors.

For example, there’s been a lot of talk recently about how big brands seem impervious to many algorithmic updates and clampdowns. It’s well known that certain niches violate Google’s paid-link guidelines, but they aren’t getting penalized or banned. We hear about how Google possibly has a whitelist/exemption list for sites that shouldn’t be affected by algorithm changes. In short, the rules are not the same across the board.

Thus, when you’re building links, you need to figure out what will work for your site and your niche, as you share the same “culture.”

1. Look At Others In Your Niche

Where are they getting links? Take a look at your closest competitors (both rankings-wise and business-wise, as these can obviously differ) and see what types of sites link to them.

Are there a lot of spam sites linking in? Are the backlink profiles full of .edu and .gov sites? What about news and media sites?

What types of links are they? Are the profiles mainly made up of sitewides such as sidebar and footer links? Do they have mostly homepage links, or are the profiles full of good deep links as well? What about image links and nofollows?

How do their anchors break down in terms of primary, long-tail, brand, URL, and noise percentages? These are the five most common categories that I use when doing a backlink analysis of anchor text, but depending upon the niche, I sometimes use Local, Foreign Language, etc.

Do your competitors typically show a very high percentage of primary keywords? Are they doing well for brand and URL links? Looking at these in terms of percentages can give you an idea of how anchors are commonly used for your industry.

What’s their rate of link growth? I cannot say enough good things about Majestic’s Backlink History tool. Throw in your competitors’ URLs and see what their link graphs look like. Are they doing the recommended slow and steady climb, are there massive link spikes here and there, or is it a flat line?

Do they have directory listings, and if so, which directories? If they all have DMOZ listings and you don’t, maybe you should try to get one. If none of them have any of the higher-end paid directory listings, you might be able to get away with not bothering. You might be able to find some good niche directories that list your competitors, as well.

Are they getting obviously paid links? This is a tricky one, as I know that not all paid links are obviously paid links. However, many paid links make it glaringly obvious that they’ve been purchased. I’d advise that even if your competitors are getting away with having very spammy paid links, you don’t try it though.

2. Evaluate Risk Tolerance

Figure out your tolerance for risk if you’re going to pay for links or do anything else that violates Google’s guidelines.

If all of your competitors are (most likely) buying links and it’s working, maybe you can get away with it too. Maybe not though, so make sure you understand exactly what you’re risking by violating Google’s guidelines.

You could be penalized or banned, and if that would sink your business, you have to decide whether buying links is worth it. There are many other safer ways of building links if you’re in most industries.

3. Find Your Target Demographic

Not every industry is well-suited to being promoted on Twitter and Facebook. You can certainly grab those accounts and use them, but you need to figure out where to spend your time. If you are a local hair salon with last-minute deals to promote, maybe you’re better off spending more time on Foursquare than Facebook. Social media can be incredibly helpful for many niches, but it’s not perfect for everyone.

It takes a lot of time to do social media well, so if the people you target don’t use these services, perhaps you should focus on creating more good content, sending out email newsletters, posting videos to Youtube, and being active in a niche forum.

Again, check to see what your competitors are doing in the various social media platforms. If none of them use Twitter, you can either sit back and relax for a bit, or you can be the first to use it. If everyone uses Twitter and you don’t, it’s probably time to start.

The same holds true for the other social media sites. (Note: Ignite Social Media has an excellent roundup on all the various social media demographics for 2010. )

4. Approach Your Link Plan Wisely

Above all else, don’t buy into the idea that the newest link building tactic is right for you, or that you have to take every link building recommendation to heart.

Don’t think that if you’re selling surety bonds, you need to approach online marketing in the exact same way as if you’re selling street art iphone cases. A cool infographic may get client X loads of links, but may do almost nothing for you. Remember that there are many ways of getting your name out there, both online and offline.

Stock Image from Shutterstock, used under license.

What do you do if Google warns you about a violation of its paid links policy and you can’t find any such links on your web site? If you’re a small webmaster you might go to Google’s Webmaster Help forums and ask for help. But if you’re part of the website team at a major international publication, you might keep things in-house and deal with the problem quietly.

Unless you’re part of the Forbes.com website team, that is.

As Barry Schwartz first posted on Search Engine Roundtable, Forbes.com’s Denis Pinsky went to Google’s Webmaster Help forum to share the letter that Google sent after finding paid links on the magazine’s website. Pinsky asked readers,

Can someone help figure out what Links are in violation?

Well, yes, as it turns out, someone can. TechCrunch showed Pinsky that the “Resources” section of a page about E-business had several links that appear to be the subject of Google’s letter. Those links are followed and appear to be paid ads. TechCrunch also points out that it noticed Forbes removing these kinds of links across Forbes.com earlier this week … but apparently missing this page, if not others.

Silly Forbes.

But what about Google? Is this the first time Google ever bothered to send Forbes such a warning? If so, what took so long? Forbes.com was one of the sites that lost toolbar PageRank in 2007 due to selling links, something that was still ongoing when Danny Sullivan wrote about it again in 2009. Maybe the better question is, What took Forbes so long to try removing all those links? And how soon will that list of … cough … “Resources” be removed from the E-business page?

The New Yorks Times presented their findings to Google. Googler Matt Cutts, head of webspam, confirmed that the tactics violated the Google webmaster guidelines and shortly after, the J.C. Penney web site was nowhere to found for the queries they had previously ranked number one for. Matt tweeted that “Google’s algorithms had started to work; manual action also taken”.

J.C. Penney, when contacted by the New York Times, said that they didn’t know anything about the links and promptly fired their SEO firm, SearchDex.

So where did J.C. Penney go wrong? Why did they do it? What have they lost? And how do they get it back? Read on to learn more and make sure this doesn’t happen to you.

“Link Schemes” and the Google Webmaster Guidelines

The web is big. Like more than a trillion pages big. When a searcher types a couple of words into the search box, Google has to be able to sort through all the pages on the web and show the searcher the ones that are the most relevant to the search, as well as the most useful. That’s a tough challenge. Google uses hundreds of signals to figure this out in an automated way. Historically, the link graph has factored fairly heavily into these relevance and value algorithms.

Google was launched on a foundation of PageRank: the idea that people link to things they like and find valuable, so a page with a lot of links to it is probably more useful than a page without very many links. How people link comes into play too. If a bunch of links to a page use the anchor text “watch the latest episode of Glee online”, then it’s reasonable to assume that the page being linked to has a video of the TV show Glee. (Note: Google has evolved well beyond this simplistic explanation as the web itself has evolved.)

Over time, as site owners realized how valuable it was to rank well in Google search results, some began hatching “link schemes”. Rather than just hope people find our content valuable enough to link to and raise awareness of the content through traditional marketing techniques, how about we just make a deal and agree to link to each other? We both get links with the anchor text of queries we want to rank for and everyone’s happy!

Everyone, that is, except Google. And searchers. Because these types of back room deals break the PageRank algorithm, which was based on a link equating to someone finding the content valuable. With a link exchange, the link simply equates to a deal being made. Less useful results could rise to the top, causing the search results to be of lower quality.

Hence, the Google webmaster guidelines, which at their core say this: our algorithms are meant to surface the best possible results to searchers. If you try to manipulate those algorithms, we might lower your site’s rankings or take your site out of our index entirely.

Matt Cutts manages a very large team dedicated to finding violations to the guidelines and then refining the algorithms to catch them in a wide swath as well as manually remove sites or lower their rankings.

Paid Links

What if you want a bunch of links to get to the top of the rankings quickly but you don’t want to link back (maybe because you think exchanging links would be too obvious to Google and you’d get caught or because you don’t want your site to lose credibility with visitors by linking to a bunch of random, irrelevant sites)? Why not just buy links? Note that buying links for PageRank purposes is very different from buying online advertising. Advertising links generally include code that cause them to be seen differently by search engines so that they’re not counted like editorial links would be. As you might imagine, Google doesn’t like links purchased for PageRank manipulation any more than they like link exchanges.

You can read more about both of these kinds of links directly from Google:

• Google Webmaster Guidelines: Link Schemes
• Google Webmaster Guidelines: Paid Links

Why Do Organizations Purposely Violate the Guidelines?

If all of this artificial linking is against the Google webmaster guidelines and could get a site removed from the index, wouldn’t sites that rely on unpaid search traffic be very careful that they adhere to the guidelines? You would think. And most do.

But some companies think they can outsmart Google. They think they won’t get caught. They see that it works for competitors. They try it and it works for them too. So they say think well, the guidelines say not to do it, but it works! I’m getting more traffic and sales than ever! Why would I stop?

In other cases (as seems to be the case with J.C. Penney), a company hires the wrong search engine optimization firm — one that that engage in tactics that violate the guidelines (and guidelines involving linking are only a small part). Firms that implement these types of tactics want to show the client results quickly. Most of them think they won’t get caught. A few of the more unscrupulous ones don’t care. They figure they’ll collect their money and move on. If the site in question gets burned later, that won’t impact the SEO firm.

High search rankings for targeted queries can be very valuable to companies. We at Search Engine Land talked to the New York Times reporter who wrote this story while he was researching just how valuable a number one ranking really is. It’s impossible to pin that down exactly, but it’s certainly the case that most of us use search engines for product research and many of us make those purchases online. A recent PEW Internet study found that 88% of online Americans who make over $75,000 a year conduct online product research and 81% purchase products and services online. Google released some data just before the holidays that indicated that nearly 90% of consumers research online. Many of them then buy online, whereas others then buy at a store.

Undoubtedly, J.C. Penney found that ranking well for so many queries over the holiday season helped them with both online and offline sales. A spokesperson downplayed this, saying that just seven percent of traffic to the site comes from unpaid search results. But between online sales and online research that drove buyers into the stores, it’s likely all of this visibility was indeed valuable.

The trouble is that generally, these tactics don’t work forever. And if you’re basing your business on them, you’re building on a shaky foundation that could cause things to come crashing down at any moment.

What Happened with J.C. Penney?

Doug Pierce, who worked with New York Times to uncover what was happening with J.C. Penney (and wrote about his experience) found that the site had a LOT of links pointing to it. From peculiar sites. With very descriptive anchor text. You can see this for yourself using free online tools. Take, for instance, a search for [comforter sets]. Bing still ranks J.C. Penney as the second unpaid result:

Yahoo Site Explorer shows that 774 pages link to that URL:

Music teams? Piano players for hire? Car modification? Why would those sites link to a J.C. Penney page listing comforter sets for sale? Open Site Explorer shows that the anchor text from these random pages is amazingly descriptive:

The likeliest answer here is that someone (J.C. Penney possibly suspects their SEO firm, since they quickly fired them) bought into a paid link network. (J.C. Penney said they would work to get these links removed and indeed many of them are already.)

Branko Rihtman ran some of the URLs through Majestic SEO‘s link reporting tool and found that it appears that links were acquired in two bursts that coincided with the holiday seasons at the end of 2009 and 2010. (This graph aligns with the statement from Matt Cutts that the recent paid links campaign seems to have been running for the last three to four months.) Below are trends of new links (from pages and domains) to that comforter sets page just before the 2009 and 2010 holiday seasons.

What Is the Impact?

Doug Pierce said it was “the most ambitious attempt [of link spamming he's] ever heard of”.  Sadly, it’s not the most ambitious attempt I’ve ever heard of. When I worked at Google managing Webmaster Central (where the webmaster guidelines reside), I saw this kind of thing all of the time. And I saw the impact it had first hand. Now that I’m no longer at Google, I regularly field emails and phone calls from companies, large and small, panicked because they’ve lost their major source of revenue due to lost rankings in Google. More than one company has told me they’d have to close down entirely if they weren’t able to get their traffic from Google back (and a site can’t always get its rankings back). I showed the following slide at a keynote I gave recently, showing the impact it can have on a site’s traffic to violate the guidelines:

When I caution companies against tactics that violate the guidelines, they sometimes say that I’m being a goody goody or as an ex-Googler simply have strong allegiance to Google. Some tell me that they have an obligation to use all of the tools available to them to gain an audience and revenue. But the truth is just that I’ve seen too many analytics reports with traffic down and to the right. And I feel my obligation is to help  companies build sustainable audiences and revenue.

Building a long term search strategy that adheres to the search engine guidelines may mean that it takes longer before you start seeing traffic from search engines, but that traffic is not at risking of drying up at any moment.

What If This Happens to You?

The best scenario is not to go down the path of manipulating search engine algorithms, but instead focus on solid search acquisition principles (building a site search engines can access, creating content your audience wants, raising awareness of that content…). Take care when hiring a search engine optimization firm. You want a firm who will work with you to improve your site and content. If the firm says you don’t need to be involved or won’t give you specifics on how they work, be wary. (Google has some tips on hiring an SEO firm.)

But it still can be tough. SearchDex devotes an entire page of their site to their adherence to the webmaster guidelines, including a statement that “SearchDex does not support link scheme architectures”. (To be clear, I have no knowledge on whether or not they were involved with the placement of the links.)

But if you find that you’ve lost your search traffic and that a likely cause is a violation of the webmaster guidelines, the first thing you should do is fix everything. Review your site and make sure nothing suspicious remains. Then log into Google Webmaster Tools and file a reconsideration request. (Note, if you have a Webmaster Tools account, Google may let you know when they’ve found violations on your site and give you a chance to fix them.) In the request form, explain everything that happened and how you fixed it. Google will manually review the situation and if they find that everything is cleaned up, they may let you back in.

What’s Going to  Happen to jcpenney.com?

They’ve started cleaning up the links so as long as no other problems remain (Doug Pierce, who helped the New York Times with the investigation noted at least two other issues that will need to be fixed), the following will likely happen:

• Any lowered rankings due to algorithmic factors will likely continue as these algorithms find these kinds of links and ensuring they aren’t sending value signals. Matt Cutts told the New York Times that this change impacted how Google trusts links.
• Any manual actions that have lowered their rankings will likely be manually be removed once everything is cleaned up.

The New York Times article points out that Google has been public about action they’ve taken due to violations guidelines before. In 2006, Matt Cutts posted on his blog about removal of bmw.de. That site was removed entirely from Google, but once BMW fixed things, they were let back in.

Does this mean that jcpenney.com will start ranking number one for all of those searches again? Probably not. For instance, the New York Times article notes that the site was number one for [samsonsite carry on luggage] and has dropped to 78. It was number one in part due to all of those links. It’s 78 due to Google’s action. Its “real” ranking is somewhere in between and that’s likely where it will end up once the smoke clears.

We keep hearing about all the latest and greatest new way to build links, things we “must” do, but we don’t always step back and consider what a natural link profile actually looks like as we try to beat everyone else in the SERPs.

When doing a backlink audit, there are a few things that automatically make me ask questions, namely “what happened here?” Since I firmly believe that having a good idea of a link history is critical before moving forward with a campaign, and I am slowly but surely becoming less nonchalant about risk, I thought I’d share these items with you and explain why they concern me.

Now, none of this is intended to say that these occurrences are indicators of Google violations, etc. They’re simply changes that make me take a closer look. The more risk-averse I become, the more I don’t like to find anything that makes me take a closer look, if you get my drift.

Link Spikes

Link spikes are a natural phenomenon in link building, occurring whenever you get an increased number of links in a small period of time. They can also serve as an indicator that something unnatural is happening with your site’s marketing. If I view my site’s link spikes over the past year, they occur whenever I have an article published.

Over the course of time, they appear in a very natural manner, as they happen at certain increments. I’ve examined backlink history graphs that look very nice and have gradual increases each month, then there’s a massive spike that can be traced to a piece of linkbait.

To me, that seems ok as there’s an explanation for it, but I can see that it would seem odd if I had no idea of what caused the spike. While I’m not as worried about the signals that link spikes send as I once was, I do think that they can look very out of place, and that concerns me. However, since I don’t work for Google, I’ll hush about it now.

Changes in Link Types

Remember all the fuss surrounding no-follow ages ago? We were told that it needed to be placed on paid links so we wouldn’t be penalized. People rushed to no-follow their paid links (and probably some that just looked sketchy)…can you imagine how that changed all the data for a site?

One month, you do a report and you have 50 nofollowed links, then the next month, all of a sudden you have 1000. Weirdness. If I had been watching a site for a few months, I would have wondered why the links all changed to nofollow, and of course I’d be thinking that it was because those were all paid.

(While not a change per se, I also find it very strange to come across a page full of links that are no-followed except for one big glaring and most likely paid link.)

Changes In Link Targets

If you have been around for a few years and your backlink profile is 98% homepage links, it would look odd to immediately get 1000 new subpage ones, right? Similarly, if you’re usually getting a sprinkling of links here and there to subpages and suddenly get 500 to one brand new page, it’s going to look unusual.

Of course, there could be a logical explanation but remember that the explanation may not be obvious. Again, as with all of this, changes in link types can happen in a very natural manner, but a significant switch to subpages from the homepage (or vice versa) can definitely look very strange.

Anchor Text Variety

This is one of the ones that concerns me the most as a link builder. We’ve done audits of profiles that have almost no keywordized links. They are 98% brand/site/URL anchors. These people want to build 500 links to a long-tailed phrase such as “magical unicorn wizard hats that glow in the dark.”

Imagine seeing that profile, as you’d immediately cringe, and not just because of the wizard aspect. It just looks like someone decided he wants to rank for that term for his site, and he’s gone out and (probably) bought a bunch of spammy links because let’s face it, no one is going to naturally link to you with that anchor text.

In general, don’t take a kneejerk reaction to link building, especially without considering how you’ve done things in the past. If you decide that you need to build more brand/URL/keyword/nofollow/image/directory links, then do so by all means, but don’t just stop doing what has been working for you. Algorithms change and new things are constantly being touted as the tactic you need, but it’s just not a good idea to keep drastically switching your methods, either.

I have seen no conclusive evidence that either confirms or denies the idea that you should always keep your link building as natural-looking as possible in order to rank well. We can rank sites with paid links for ultra-competitive terms and those rankings stick. We can lose rankings in exactly the same way.

However, that does not at all mean that attempting risky methods is a good idea. What works for one niche or site may not work for yours. What works today may not work next week. This is why, in the end, it’s probably best to do your utmost to keep your links looking as organic as you possibly can, and your link history plays a big role in exactly how you do that.