Google Zaps Another Link Network, ‘Several Thousand’ Link Sellers Hit

What a week it’s been where Google and SEO are concerned. The company, via Matt Cutts, has issued several warnings about things to come — and, late Tuesday night, also revealed that it’s just acted against another link network.

In a pair of tweets, Cutts — the head of Google’s webspam team — said that Google has taken action against “several thousand” link sellers that were part of a link network that bought and sold links that pass PageRank.

In addition to mattcutts.com/blog/what-to-e… it’s safe to assume webspam will continue to tackle link networks that violate our guidelines as well.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 15, 2013

In fact, we took action on several thousand linksellers in a paid-link-that-passes-PageRank network earlier today.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 15, 2013

I can’t speak (or guess) to what network was hit, but these sites can’t claim they weren’t aware of what might happen. On Monday, Cutts published a video that included a warning about Google’s plans to go “upstream” in its fight against spammy links. He also offered a specific warning against link networks at our SMX West conference in March.

That warning at SMX West came just days after Google hit another link network (believed to be SAPE Links). In March 2012, we also wrote about Google’s takedown of the BuildMyRank.com link network.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz: Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, revealed which link selling network was hit. We wrote about it in our story named Google’s Latest Link Seller Hit Targeted Text Link Ads.