iAcquire was cited as the agency behind Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation’s link buy request emails. For more on that see our story named What Can We Learn From The Latest Brand To Be Called Out For Paid Links?

A site command search for [site:www.iacquire.com] returns no results. Here is a screen shot:

iAcquire’s robots.txt file and source code has no signs of them manually requesting to be deindexed from Google. So this seems to either be a weird bug or an intentional penalty delivered to the agency by Google.

It also appears that the parties discovered in this investigation are all delisted from Google.

We reached out to Google for a comment but at the time of publishing this story, we have not heard back. If and when Google does reply, we will update the story.

Mike King, the Director of Inbound Marketing at iAcquire, responded to a tweet I sent him asking if Google delisted iAcquire. He said, iAcquire “sure was” delisted by Google. He then went on to explain that there was “no network” for Google to ban so they had a “hissy fit” and decided to ban the agency.

Here is his tweet:

@rustybrick sure was. There’s no network for them to kill so that’s them throwing their hissy fit.

— MyCool King (@iPullRank) May 25, 2012

I am not aware of another agency that was banned by Google for this practice. There were link networks and link brokers that have been banned but I don’t believe there was ever an agency that was banned for this practice.

We will update the story when we learn more.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan (May 25, 4:15pm ET)

As noted in the comments below, this is probably not the first time an agency has been banned because Google believes that it has bought or sold links — if that’s why iAcquire was indeed banned. We still don’t have an official word from Google on this, but it seems the most likely explanation.

However, it’s also likely the iAcquire was banned not for buying links but because Google believes it actually does control a paid link network or operates at least in significant part as a paid link company, despite iAcquire’s denials.

From my story yesterday, iAcquire said:

To be clear, we are not a link network. Every link we build is based on the very same principles touted throughout the industry. Our links are contextual and relevant through outreach performed by 40 actual in-house people that sit in our Arizona office and everything is pushed through strenuous quality assurance….

We are not a paid link company.

This leads to an important graphic from Josh Davis that connects iAcquire with companies that apparently are buying links (click to enlarge it):

The graphic, from Davis’s article here, explains why Davis believes the link request he originally received from a company called InternetReach.org is either owned by, controlled by or works in close association with iAcquire.

The companies in the graphic are mostly the same as the companies that DBBC listed in a letter it sent out yesterday to Google and DBBC’s SEO agencies, in hopes of getting the paid links removed.

InternetReach.org (where the original link request is said to have come from), MediaFinders.net and iOutReach.org all have the same San Francisco address listed on their contact pages, as does LinkBuilding.net (it’s LinkBuilder.net in the chart above, but that’s clearly a typo — Davis uses LinkBuilding.net in his story). MediaFinders.net and iOutReach both use virtually the same site template.

LinkBuilding.net has a Better Business Bureau logo on its site leading to a BBB listing for iAcquire, for its office in Arizona. That’s the connection between all four of the companies above to iAcquire. Certainly anyone might have added a BBB listing to iAcquire as some type of set-up, but this seems more farfetched than the idea that iAcquire has some assocition with LinkBuilding.net.

The story from Davis outlines other connections, such as things he was told when he called the number in the link request, that further seem to tie these companies back to iAcquire. By the way, InternetReach.org, LinkBuilding.net and DigitalPros.org all appear to have also been banned by Google.

In addition, there’s evidence that iAcquire acquired the paid link operations of Conductor, when it sold that operation last year, including three iAcquire employees having gone directly from Conductor to iAcquire, according to their LinkedIn profiles (see here, here and here).

I asked Joe Griffin, cofounder and partner with iAcquire, if the companies involved were part of iAcquire, subsidiaries or contractors and if iAcquire had purchased Conductor’s paid link service. I was told, similar to yesterday, that because of confidentiality reasons, iAcquire couldn’t comment on any of this.

As for an official comment on apparently being banned, Griffin emailed me:

iAcquire doesn’t take the position that Google is throwing a hissy fit. Mike mentioned that on Twitter to Barry, and perhaps he is right, but that’s not our position on the matter. Google has a job to do. This was a harsh lesson, but our position is to grow from this, make the required changes, get back in Google, and continue to offer world class WHITE hat services to our customers (financial compensation will not be considered in the outreach process).

We’ve also received an email from someone who said they were an iAcquire client and asked the company about the current situation. This is the email they say iAcquire sent back:

Thank you for the email.  Rest assured that we have always followed best practice and as we don’t have a network and our publishers and clients won’t be impacted.

Going forward we will be ending the ability to compensate for new links. That said, our non-compensated link services are VERY good. This is a good opportunity for us all to evolve our practices and a powerful lesson for our agency, your agency, our clients, your clients.

Our outreach technology continues to be the best in our industry and we have been working on all white-hat options aggressively for the past year. While I understand your concern we have been evolving and have been performing incredible work.

Let’s use this opportunity to serve the greater goals we all have. We know how to deliver amazing white hat off-page SEO solutions – this pushes us all to focus on the right things.  Feel free to contact me anytime if you have any questions.

I’m set to talk with Griffin further on Tuesday, after the long holiday weekend here in the US, and I expect he’ll have more to share on the situation then.

Josh Davis drew attention to the DBCC situation in his post today, documenting how after receiving three link requests from the same person, he finally followed up, only to be pitched on placing a link from one of his articles to the DBCC site in return for $30 per month.

What’s Dun & Bradstreet — the nearly 200-year-old Fortune 500 company that brokers information about people and companies for business decisions — doing buying links? It’s not. DBCC was spun-off from D&B in 2010 and is a privately-held company, providing credit solutions to small businesses, with a license to use the D&B brand.

That DBCC isn’t a Fortune 500 company takes some of the “wow” factor out of the story. In addition, we’ve already had stories about big companies ranging from JC Penney to Overstock to even Google itself getting caught for paid links. That makes what DBCC was doing seem even less newsworthy to some. After all, doesn’t everyone do this now? What’s really new or unique here?

I supposed there is nothing particularly new, but clearly there’s a bunch of reminders that are useful to have out there.

Client Beware

Judy Hacket, the chief marketing officer of DBCC, sounded pretty horrified when I talked with her today about the situation. Her department was scrambling to discover how exactly it ended up with these links being purchased.

Davis connects the link request in his story back to iAcquire. Hacket wouldn’t say if DBCC is working with that firm, citing possible confidentiality clauses in contacts. She did say, however, “we have absolutely no agreement with iAcquire or anyone else allowing them to use any grey hat or black hat practices.”

Hacket was also adamant that DBCC had no desire to violate any of Google’s guidelines.

“We would never endorse something like this,” she said.

Of course, we’ve heard this type of denial / shock before. Recall what JC Penney said last year, after the New York Times profiled it for using paid links:

J.C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies.

Curious to learn more, I asked JC Penney what those policies were after the New York Times story came out. A JCP spokesperson emailed me back:

We are not going to provide our policies, but obviously, they would include staying within Google’s guidelines.

Well, obviously! Except they didn’t, otherwise JC Penney wouldn’t have been banned. When JCP said it didn’t authorize or was involved with paid links, it meant that its SEO firm did all that. As I was told further in my email exchange:

SearchDex ran our SEO program. We do not pay for links as they go against Google’s guidelines. SearchDex was terminated because as our SEO provider they should have known. This was a clear failure on their part.

It was also a clear failure on JCP’s part, for not understanding what its SEO company was doing. The same is true for DBCC. Indeed, I’ve been joking that for some time, whenever some large brand gets dinged for paid links, it’s handy to have an SEO firm they can pin the blame on.

The reality is that for the large companies or brand names, this type of behavior seems to get a 90 day slap, then they’re back in Google’s good graces. It’s difficult for Google to permanently remove an important company that people expect to find. That means as a client, or as an important brand, keep these lessons in mind:

• Do you fully understand how your SEO company will obtain links for you?
• If you don’t want paid links, have you made that crystal-clear?
• If you approve of buying paid links, are you prepared for a potential short-term PR black eye?
• If you approve of buying paid links, is that worth a potential short-term Google penalty?

If you’re not a major brand or an essential resource that Google has to list, there’s really only one question you need to ask. Are you prepared to lose all your traffic from Google? That’s because for the non-essential people, being caught for paid links can be a death sentence, not a temporarily set-back.

SEO Company Beware

As for the SEO company buying links, you’d better be prepared for your client to toss you to the wolves, if a paid link campaign comes to light. Also do be prepared for that campaign to come to light, unless you’re incredibly careful with whom you are soliciting.

In this case, the SEO company pitched someone whose “About” page explains that he writes about marketing. That should have been a warning that this person is probably somewhat savvy about paid links, so some disguised pitch for one wasn’t wise.

I get these types of pitches myself. So does Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team. If I’d gotten this type of email sent to me on behalf of a major brand, I might very well have written about it myself and concerns about “outing” be damned. I’d view it as a protective service to the general human population. It’s like watching someone drive backwards on the freeway. They’re a danger to everyone.

As for iAcquire itself, it won’t comment on the case, citing client confidentiality. It won’t acknowledge that it was involved in any way, nor confirm if it has worked with DBCC. But the company did give me this statement:

We work with many of the largest brands in the world. It’s very common that we run into large brands everyday buying links from blog networks and large paid link marketplaces, and our mission as a business is to direct brand strategy towards whiter hat link building approaches.

That movement often takes time and effort – and, in the real world in working with big brands with pre-established objectives it frequently is a multi-step process, and requires a lot of education at both the SEO manager, online marketing marketing manager and CMO-levels. We are literally driving the education process every day.

To be clear, we are not a link network. Every link we build is based on the very same principles touted throughout the industry. Our links are contextual and relevant through outreach performed by 40 actual in-house people that sit in our Arizona office and everything is pushed through strenuous quality assurance.

Our business is to push brands to white hat strategy, but we frequently acquire new customers that are still on that path, and we support these companies toward that white hat direction. We have been investing significantly into our content marketing, social media, and digital PR channels to more rapidly make those changes internally and for these brands.

Regarding the article written about our company, we can’t talk about specific strategy for specific customers or potential customers – due to confidentiality agreements. Financial compensation for links does not represent the strategic direction of our company. iAcquire’s services are holistic and include a great deal of content marketing, digital PR and social media promotion, and on-page SEO consulting.

We’ve never had a problem with Google’s algorithm and our clients – and, we understand that it is important for us to continue to drive the market towards techniques that best represent the guidelines established by search engines. iAcquire continues to evolve its service lines, and recently brought in Mike King to help drive that direction to ensure we are considering search engine guidelines and industry best practices. In addition, he continues to promote these best practices at various conferences worldwide.

Wait, is iAcquire suggesting that DBCC — assuming it eventually emerges as a client — was one of those companies needing to be nudged into the white hat world? Cofounder Joe Griffin effectively said no, when he emailed this follow-up statement:

We aren’t talking about D&BCC (when we mention that we transition people from grey to white in the second sentence) – we can’t talk about specifics of clients or potential clients – we are prevented from doing so.

The enterprise world has a lot of nuances, and we believe we have more than anyone helped to correct SEO brand strategy as it relates to off-page SEO and specifically as it relates to killing black hat link networks.

At the end of the day we run into a lot of different goals, and different approaches, and we try to bring all clients to a fully white hat solution. Our team is heavily focused on high quality editorial content and creative development to attract links. We do a TON of link reclamation as well.

We brought Mike on board specifically to continue to build upon this direction. Mike is one of the best in the business in educating SEOs about how to properly implement off-page SEO strategy – he’s helping us here as well.

We are not a paid link company. We deliver holistic off-page SEO to small and large companies – and are the leading charge in proper off-page SEO education.

By Mike, Griffin is referring to Michael King, who I’d say has built a good reputation for himself in some SEO circles over the past year in his writings and speaking. He’s spoken at our own SMX events and is slated to again next month. He’s sharp, has lots of insight, and he seemed a win for iAcquire when they hired him about two months ago.

Suffice to say, I was pretty surprised that he appeared mixed up with all this. He’s seemed very white hat. I think it’s great if he’s going to help iAcquire and/or its clients move to white hat activities, but I’d say the sooner the better, if iAcquire really doesn’t want to be known as a paid link company.

Right now, however, if that link request is effectively coming out of iAcquire’s work, it might not be a paid link company, but it sure seems as if it has been buying links. That’s tough to square talk of following search engine guidelines.

Google, Oh Google

Meanwhile, there’s Google. This time last year, it was counting the news about JC Penney as a win in the war against paid links. A year later, has anything changed? Was it really that much a deterrent?

I honestly don’t know. I’ve heard some say that many SEOs buy links. That’s it’s just what you have to do. I don’t have any good survey data to back those types of statements up or knock them down.

Fair to say, however, today’s news didn’t surprise many. Even if it it had been D&B itself, I’m not sure if the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal would have cared to run stories, as they did last year with JC Penney and Overstock.

I do know that Google has got to come up with something better than counting links. I keep expecting that social will be a larger signal, and my previous story below explains more about why this makes sense:

• When Everyone Gets The Vote: Social Shares As The New Link Building

In the meantime, we’re stuck with the increasingly creaking, rotting link signal. But for anyone who thinks that’s an excuse for anything goes, look again to what I said the Client Beware section above. Are you really big enough to take a chance on being dropped from Google?

There are plenty of people who bought links who did get caught in the Penguin Update. Some of them are learning to their horror that the only chance of coming back will be to start completely over.

Finally, I did ask Google if it had any comment on the DBBC situation. Nothing specific, just this general warning:

Our guidance on paid links remains the same as ever: paying for links that pass PageRank violates our guidelines, and Google takes appropriate action in response.

If you don’t know what PageRank is, well, read our guide: What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters.

Publisher Beware; Link Broker For Shame

For those being approached about selling links, this is a reminder that Google really doesn’t like you to do that and has penalized sites for doing so since 2007. If you’re approached out of the blue with a link request, unless you block that link by using something like the nofollow attribute, you’re placing your site at jeopardy.

Don’t expect the link request to alert you to any of these things. The request that went out on behalf of DBCC was a classic example of non-disclosure. It lacks warnings about possible Google penalties. It even required that there be no visible disclosure, which might very well violate US Federal Trade Commission guidelines. From the request:

Link must not be marked as Paid in the visible content or source code (Common designations include: Partner, Links, Paid Links, Ads or Sponsored Links)

The link can’t have any disclosures, we want it to appear natural.

The whole thing reminds me of the type of spammy requests I get all the time. While people in the SEO space may want to debate whether it’s fair or required or commonplace to buy links or not, I don’t see much room for debate that you shouldn’t try to foist a paid link on someone without full disclosure.

As I wrote before, in my Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker article from 2008

There are plenty of people who disagree over the paid link issue, plus whether Google actually penalizes sites that hard for it. That disagreement is no excuse for unethical behavior. And there is unethical behavior in search marketing, and this is a perfect example of it. No risk was disclosed. When asked repeatedly about risk issues, they were denied….

You want to buy links or be a link broker? Then be upfront that this is an activity that Google does not like and that the faint hearted shouldn’t apply. Only after you’ve scared the heck out of them should you start talking about the ways that you’ll try to reduce the risk, if they choose to carry on.

Personally, I’m somewhat amazed, or really, disheartened, over some of the comments Davis is taking over his post. As I said, some dismiss the paid links as old news. Some are angry, viewing his post as some unnecessary “outing” of paid links.

No one seems bothered that some SEO firm was potentially getting a third-party web site into trouble with Google. That’s the most disturbing aspect of all of this. That’s not new, either, but it ought to be stamped out.

Postscript: DBCC has now sent a letter out to its SEO agencies saying in part:

Without our knowledge or approval, certain parties have reached out to other parties to link to our website (the “Unauthorized Links”) for no valid reason….

Please be informed that we are not affiliated with nor do we have any relationship with these companies.

We ask that you remove any Unauthorized Links immediately unless you believe the content is relevant and provides value to your users. Under no circumstances will we authorized payment or pay for any Unauthorized Links.

You can see the full letter below:

DBBC says a copy was also sent to Google, and it’s part of what DBBC is doing to try and rectify the situation. The list of companies it named in the letter are:

• InternetReach.org
• DigitalPros.org
• MediaFinders.net
• iOutReach.org
• LinkBuilder.net
• SolarPros.com
• Conductor

DBCC said it also sent a copy of the letter to the published contact addresses of those listed. The list matches those that Josh Davis listed in his original post on the paid link situation, companies he connects with iAcquire.

iAcquire was not listed in the DBBC letter. However, iAcquire has now been banned from Google since this story came out, probably because Google believes it either works in association with some of the companies named above or that it controls them.

iAcquire Banned From Google After Link Buying Allegations is our story has more about that, plus has a postscript where I explain the connections more.

Related Stories

• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
• Time For Google To Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links?
• Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker
• New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google
• 90 Days Later, J.C. Penney Regains Its Google Rankings
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business
• Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty
• Google Chrome’s Paid Link Penalty Now Lifted
• Home Depot To Correct Misleading Link Request
• Google Launches “Penguin Update” Targeting Webspam In Search Results
• Two Weeks In, Google Talks Penguin Update, Ways To Recover & Negative SEO

I conducted some random tests and did notice some of these free web directories not coming up in Google. Later in the day, Terry Van Horne began running larger tests on 500+ web directories and noticed as much as 16% or more are no longer showing up in Google. Based on his initial numbers, there are over a 100 web directories that are not indexed by Google.

I do not know if these directories were ever listed in Google or removed recently due to one of the recent Google updates; i.e. Penguin, Panda refresh, blog link network elimination and unnatural link warnings.

I did ask Google for a comment on this specific case and Google declined.

Have you noticed a recent massive delisting of web directories from Google’s index?

Warnings Issued

Many people have reported getting messages from Google regarding link violations. If you scan the Google Webmaster Help forums, for instance, you will see many examples of these being posted.

Here is how one reads:

Dear site owner or webmaster of ….

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

Links No Longer “Silently Distrusted”

Last month, Google appeared to take action against several blog/link networks. Are the messages going out because of that? Google told us no. Rather, it is that Google’s choosing to report penalties about bad linking issues more now than in the past.

A Google spokesperson emailed this statement:

The majority of the increase in messages to webmasters is not due to messages about links. Rather, Google recently started sending messages to sites even for egregious or “blackhat” violations of our quality guidelines. The vast majority of the increase in messages is thus due to expanding the types of messages we send, not because of more warnings about links.

It is true that actions on link networks have been more visible lately, but there’s an important disclaimer to that. Google has been able to trace and take action on many types of link networks; we recently decided to make that action more visible. In the past, some links might have been silently distrusted or might not have carried as much weight. More recently, we’ve been surfacing the fact that those links aren’t helping to improve ranking or indexing.

Earlier this year, Google said that it significantly increased the number of messages they have sent through Webmaster Tools in 2012.

Related Stories:

• Google Eliminates Another Link Network, BuildMyRank.com – Just One Of Several?
• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business
• Another Company Outed for Paid Links: Sequoia-Backed Milanoo
• Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome
• New York Times Continues Paid Link Outing Stories, Looks At Online Flowers Industry
• Google Chrome’s Paid Link Penalty Now Lifted
• Google Sent Over 700,000 Messages Via Webmaster Tools In Past Two Months
• Dilbert Cartoon: Caught For Paid Links On Google

For the record, I don’t see networks as being any worse than a lot of other tactics, so I’m writing this to illustrate a point, not to judge in any way.

We work with some clients who also work with other link builders who do other types of link building than we do. We also work with some clients who dictate what we do, and we work with some who leave it all up to us. Because of this, I think we have a fairly good idea of the full picture and of what works and what doesn’t work.

If I had to choose just one thing that our most successful clients have in common, it would be link diversity.

The sites that continue to enjoy good rankings and traffic are the ones that employ a variety of methods, that either have different groups working on different tactics, or that ask for and follow our advice about how to do things so that they aren’t reliant upon something that can crush them if the algorithm changes.

What Is A Diverse Link Campaign All About?

I think it’s much more than making sure that you have some nofollowed links, some image links here and there, and maybe a few good old sitewides. It’s about analyzing all the opportunities available to you and pursuing anything that you find credible. It’s also about ensuring that you’re visible in the latest and greatest places.

Where To Get Links

For a diverse profile, it’s all about getting your content out there through the use of social media, guest posting, reviews, and many other forms of interaction.

It’s about pursuing blog links, directory links, links on sites where your competitors are listed, and possibly links on crappy sites (trust me, it’s extremely rare to find a link profile that doesn’t include something spammy or questionable) and paid links that will send you lots of traffic.

Anchor Text Variation

I did something very cool recently, at a client’s request. I broke down competitors’ anchor text into categories that he gave me, rather than classifying them in my usual way. It gave me a whole new perspective on anchor text variation.

We tend to think of anchor text in broad categories like money terms or longtails, so breaking anchors down further made me see the smaller picture and identify similarities where I hadn’t seen them before.

Top Level Domain & Geo Variation

I know there are certain gold standards for link building (we love those .govs and .edus!) but I like to see a variety of links from other TLDs like .info, .net, .biz, among others. I also like to see good CCTLDs (country code top level domains) where it makes sense for your audience, but there are few sites that don’t show some sort of foreign links in their profile.

It’s kind of ethnocentric to think that you shouldn’t have those. If you’re doing link outreach and you’re finding targets by searching in Google, run some searches that will only generate results from a specific TLD or CCTLD.

Types Of Links

Permanent, sitewide, footer, sidebar, directories, links that roll off a blog’s homepage, links to your homepage, links to your subpages, profile links, forum and blog comment links, links on sites that show nothing but press releases or articles, links that fade away from a site after a certain amount of time, image links, and yes, even flashing banner links are all part of most profiles that I have analyzed.

I don’t deliberately pursue certain types of links at all times, for various reasons, but in analyzing profiles, it’s apparent that variety is definitely there. Many links that I wouldn’t necessarily pursue (like at the moment I’m not feeling the love for sitewides) are part of a natural profile and can give you great traffic if they’re well placed on the right site.

I’ve had to work on sites that had too high of a reliance upon sitewides, and that’s why I don’t usually seek them out, but I’d take a blogroll link on a great, high-profile blog relevant to my industry over an in-content one on an old site that gets 50 hits a month.

Real World Examples

Our SEO Chicks blog is approaching its 5th anniversary and I’ve used it before as an example of a very natural link profile.

Here’s what we see:

• A really nice percentage of nofollowed links that are giving us good referrals.
• Text and image links.
• A good homepage to deep page link ratio.
• Links from .com, .uk, .org, .net, .us, and .br.
• Link from the Netherlands, Germany, the US, the UK, and Canada.

A quick look at my company website shows the following:

• Links from the US, the UK, Canada, and France.
• Text links and image links.
• Nofollowed and followed links.
• .com, .net, .org, .uk, and .me links.

That is a very simplistic summary of two link profiles that are at least semi-diverse and completely natural (ie., there are no paid links involved.) There is a heavy reliance upon certain types of links (I think we have too few image links and too high a percentage of .com links for my website, for example) but it’s getting to a better place in my eyes.

We also do a local city blog called Avant Greensboro which is very, very new and shows the following:

• Massively high anchor percentage for the brand.
• No image links.
• Links from only .com and .org sites.
• Only links from the US.

Now, as I said we’re just starting out and we have not yet actively pursued links, but I can immediately devise a plan here. Since I like to create wishlists, here you go:

Now, as I’ve said earlier, this is an extremely simplistic (and initial) method of analyzing your link diversity, as it’s limited to what’s been reported by Link Research Tools in my case. However, it’s a start, and it’s a good way to see your profile in terms of its variety in a few areas.

This type of quick analysis won’t tell you things like whether you have enough blog links or whether you’re too reliant upon certain anchors (there are other tools to help you with that) but the key is to think about diversity and to pursue it.

A Final Word

You may have a rare demographic that isn’t engaged socially (yet) for example. However, as we’ve seen with the recent insane growth of Pinterest, new social networks arise that appeal to people who might not have been previously attracted to them. In fact, the people following me on Pinterest are a truly diverse group that includes an old next door neighbor, high school classmates and their moms, and of course all you SEOs.

Who knows what’s next? We may see another Facebook or Twitter, and you will need to promote your site socially. Getting good links on high-traffic blogs with lots of good social signals is (in my opinion) something that will be one of the key ways to build links moving forward. I wouldn’t have said that three years ago.

Think about this too:  in the event that something bad does happen with your site in the rankings, being able to keep traffic coming is going to be critical. You have to diversify your traffic sources, period.

BuildMyRank.com confirmed Google has deindexed an “overwhelming majority” of their network as of March 19, 2012. The management of BuildMyRank.com has decided to immediately shut down their service and provide refunds to customers.

BuildMyRank.com thought that Google would allow their network since they felt they provided “better quality service,” which was a “bit different from other networks.” But as they admitted on their blog, “this was not the case.”

On one hand, I am surprised so many people still participate in quick and easy tactics like this? Google has a long history of going after link and blog networks. Here is just one more example. But I guess when things seem to work and it is easy, a human will often go with it. Even though network after network has been hit by the paid link penalties and worse.

Jennifer Ledbetter at PotPieGirl has a lot more on this network being hit by Google on her blog. It might also just be one of several networks hit.

Digital Due Diligence, it its latest newsletter, pointed to Niche Pursuits mentioning that some other networks may have been hit, as well as two forum discussions about this.

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

Related Stories:

• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business
• The Big Paid Link Debate Roundup
• Another Company Outed for Paid Links: Sequoia-Backed Milanoo
• Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome
• New York Times Continues Paid Link Outing Stories, Looks At Online Flowers Industry
• Google Chrome’s Paid Link Penalty Now Lifted
• Google’s PageRank Update Goes After Paid Links?
• Dilbert Cartoon: Caught For Paid Links On Google

Now if you search for [chrome], [browser] or similar searches, the Google Chrome landing page will once again show up on the first page of the search results.

Here is a picture showing the page ranking in position number for on Google:

As you may remember, right after the New Years, Google was caught running a sponsored post campaign for Chrome. After a day or so, Google’s Matt Cutts applied a link penalty to the Google Chrome landing page for 60 days. Now, about days later, Google lifted the penalty.

A Google representative confirmed the penalty has been lifted.

Google told us in January:

We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days. We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users.

While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.

Hat tip to Tamir Oron from SEO Israel.

Related Stories:

• Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty
• What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters
• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
• 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
• 90 Days Later, J.C. Penney Regains Its Google Rankings
• Google Bans Itself Again By Banning BeatThatQuote.com
• Wait… Google Banned BeatThatQuote Again!
• New York Times Continues Paid Link Outing Stories, Looks At Online Flowers Industry
• Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome
• Google: Yes, Sponsored Post Campaign Was Ours But Not What We Signed-Up For

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.