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Comment by palish | Hacker News Reader

"buying links"? I'm completely new to this; would you mind explaining what the benefit is of buying links?

>buying links

People who have a high PR website may sell a link (usually in the footer, on all pages) to websites in a similar niche to help them rank better. However, for some people its not blackhat enough. Spammers nowadays tend to use automated software like the following:

-xrumer - Developed by a few russian people and primarily used by russian pharmacies for fraud, this is the most powerful "spammer" too out there. You can literally spend $1k and get 1million backlinks within a matter of days and have your site in the #1 position for whatever keyword you're aiming for.

-scrapebox - Similar to xrumer, but while xrumer targets forums (vbulletin etc), scrapebox specializes in harvesting large lists of wordpress blogs (throught google + proxies/botnets) and then posts comments on them (usually all those generic comments you see on wordpress blogs such as "nice post" "good advice, bookmarked" etc).

I could literally go on for hours and hours on how people are exploiting search engines, I think that its prime time for Google to develop an AI for this rather then just relying on algorithms. There needs to be a better PageRank alternative that needs to be implemented.

>benefits

In the most basic terms, for spammers, more links = better search rankings = more traffic = more $$$

"-xrumer - Developed by a few russian people and primarily used by russian pharmacies for fraud, this is the most powerful "spammer" too out there. You can literally spend $1k and get 1million backlinks within a matter of days and have your site in the #1 position for whatever keyword you're aiming for."

Sorry bro that ain't true anymore. Xrumer brutal blasts used to rule years ago, but I can assure you that just having a million of crappy profile/forum post links popping up at the same moment nowadays isn't going to help your site ranking as it used to be. It's just not as powerful as it was before the whole xrumer was translated and sold to non-russian speaking folks.

Xrumer is still being deployed by the "big dogs" but not to link your main, "money site" directly. More like to link to other pages with links pointing to your site (or to pages with links to other pages with links to other pages with link to other pages that eventually link to your money site). Never directly, too risky (even though it's debated how risky it is, but still why taking a chance to find it out).

Buying links today means (more like) purchasing services like seolinkvine.com or buildmyrank.com where you buy posts (about the kw you want to target and have on them a contextual link) on network of sites with an high home page Page Rank.

Nonetheless Google is catching up with these networks, recently deindexing a lot of their sites and making their users, who spent lots of money for those links, feel really, really, really bad.

Pros in tough industries had to adapt to Google's algo evolution: they now build their own networks, they put out decent content on them, they provide a good user experience, they tend not to over-optimize, they host them on different A-class IPs, they have their domains registered with different names/addresses/etc, they build multiple tiers of links to their backlinks with custom developed softwares (or Zennoposter) with private proxies and their 24/7 running servers and so on.

It's not a cheap process nor a quick one.

As for now and long-term rankings, spamming isn't just enough.

To be on the safe side you really need to follow Matt Cutt's evergreen advice: build a kick-ass site that even a human reviewer working for Google would love to see on the first spots.

Knowing how easy it was to manipulate google results (and to some extent, it still is) imo that's the right direction from the perspective of a everyday user who's searching for something that's not clicking on Adsense ads or buying something.

Google is a little smarter than all those spam tools... I think some might work, in some instances, but the real threat to google I think is buying links from high quality private sites off the grid, where you actually analyze which links are helping your competitors rank, using tools like opensiteexplorer and majestic seo, and approaching them privately to buy links or place sponsored blog posts on their sites....

Just to be clear, there are 40 some factors that effect the value of a link, and that is just on a generic level, these factors carry different weight in different verticals, and based on other signals. http://wiep.net/link-value-factors/

I think we need to wait and see how google rolls out this new penalty to see how it plays out.

"AI" is algorithms, and it is what a large fraction of Google engineering does all day.

The most obvious means to counter this strategy is to watch the rank delta of any given site and dampen it. If a site goes from 12 incoming links to 12,000,000 in a few weeks, penalize proportionally pending human review.

What if the site just went viral?

Should the human reviewer check every link by hand?

Think codecademy.com now first for "learn to code". I mean, is it best place to learn how to code? At the moment, I'd say it's not. Is it the third result "codeyear.com" (run by codecademy as well)? I'm sure there are better sites that could take that spot and provide more value to the user than that landing page pointing to codecademy (Nothing personal against the codecademy guys of course, big kudos for their venture so far and best wishes for the future).

The problem with today's algorithm is that it can't really tell which site is really good and which one is just popular, mainstream, consolidated, with a high PR. Think lifehacker.com second for "learn to code" (on my side of the world, on google.com and chrome incognito mode on).

Right now if every single newspaper of the world cover your site about how to build a homemade nuclear device and actually write something about the matter in the article (how it would be natural to be), use as anchor text "how to build an atomic bomb" and link to your site, your site will skyrocket to the top for that kw (and many others similar). Even if it's just a school project or a joke that made it to the news.

Where's the quality check?

Anyway I'm sure that smart people are currently working on these details and that a comment reply can't really do justice to the complexity of the issue.

Im sure humans can quickly ascertain whether a site suddenly went viral or is being gamed, as the number of such sites is fairly small. I never said a comment reply is the panacea or do can possibly do justice to the totality of search quality, just that an explosive delta in page rank should not be a major issue to a company with the resources of a google.

Google's claim on this subject is that they not only use PR or popularity of pages that link to you but also their authority (or domain relevance). So a link from Stack Overflow would count more for a search term like "learn to code" than say, a link from Howcast.

The most obvious counter to that is to drip-feed out links. Sites like http://linklicious.me/ offer this facility for a while now.

Nice try, pre Skynet bot. We're not falling for your suggestion of building an AI for search.

Besides, if one really good one does exist, many/most SEO people would be out of a job; white or black hats.

Why is that a bad thing? Maybe they could do something more productive with their lives than figuring out ways to corrupt one of the most useful information tools humanity has built...

Whitehat SEOs aren't corrupting anything. Hell, Matt Cutts gives them advice on how better to do their job.

Indeed I (SEO engineer for a large publisher) spend 70% of my time giving feed back to our developers on how to build a site correctly - whats the best way to handle pagination or faceting on a 10M page site for example.

Historically, a large component of Google's ranking algorithm involves the number of links pointing to a website (and a number of other qualities like anchor text, unique domains, surrounding text, etc.). If my memory serves me, there are over 300 ranking factors - but links are still the most important.

By buying links (undetected) you can manipulate the quality and relevancy of your website in Google's eyes and cause it to rank better than it should.

To add to this, the reason they can't penalize you is because then you would just buy links for your competitor. All Google can do is drop value on links when they detect malicious behavior. As such, buying links still largely results in a positive effect on your rankings. Google is starting to focus more on other factors than links though, social signals in particular are becoming a big factor.

Didn't chrome get penalized for buying links? http://www.seroundtable.com/google-chrome-penalty-14543.html

I think algorithmically they can only discount links from bad neighborhoods, etc... but if they catch you, they will manually penalize you.

I think we are a ways away from social signals being a "big factor." While google does claim that they look at social signals, I think from a practical standpoint the only value they provide is raising a red flag when someone manipulates social signals like buying likes and plus ones. The same way google looks at a link profile of a site, they can catch a bad social profile that seems unnatural.

Chrome being penalized was a bit of a special case. Google got caught (even though it wasn't directly them) and they gave a harsher punishment to themselves because they claim they hold themselves to a higher standard. The whole thing was really damage control to save their reputation, they already had a lot of scandals this year.

In reality, links are almost never seen as a negative. Which is really a shame, because it makes it harder for good-guy SEO's to legitimately build links when you can just buy 10,000 on Fiverr and not worry about it. And most black-hat SEOs buy links from many players, so even if some are discounted they won't usually still come out on top.

Google is getting better at it though. Recently they've been cracking down on blog networks. This is purely conjecture, but I do believe that links are on their way out as the primary signal.

Apologies, missed a typo: "And most black-hat SEOs buy links from many players, so even if some are discounted they WILL usually still come out on top."

As long as links are what connects the internet, they will be a MAJOR ranking factor in my opinion.

You pay for people, link farmers, to link back to your webpage with specific anchor text. The link farmers typically have a network of websites they can distribute this over, offering you a few hundred or thousand links back to your site with your targeted keywords. Sometimes, the link farms even have good pagerank, which makes it even better.

That's the whole point of the Google backlinks - get as many links back to your site as you can, and you'll get good SEO.

And if you do this, and Google detects it, they nail you.

So how much would it cost to "frame" someone else's website for SEO to get them unfairly banned from Google?

I'd never do it; it's just an interesting question.

This is a quite realistic concern. There is a story going around from Germany were smaller online shops were the targets of link-blackmailing. If they refused to pay certain "fees" they were hit by massive amounts of destructive links, i.e. those with "sex", "viagra" or "porn" keywords. Some shops indeed refused to pay and promptly were loosing massive amounts of traffic/customers. Here is the original story, unfortunately only in German: http://www.golem.de/news/google-ranking-wie-ein-erpresser-ei...

It's very unlikely. This seems to be one of the reasons google has been turning what appears to be a blind eye toward paid links - it's hard not to throw out the baby with the bath water.

Exactly what I was thinking. Probably not any more than it would cost the website owner, however much that is. Depending on how successful your competition is and how much money you have in the bank this could be a viable strategy.

And the implications of that make me shiver a little.

(Disclosure: I have no idea how much it would cost. But my hypothesis is that it would be the same as if the website owner had done it.)

I think Google simply discounts the non-valuable links rather than penalizes the sites. Otherwise things like this can happen.

Let's say I run a site with lots of Google juice. For the low, low price of $[big number], I'll link to your site to give you some of my Google juice.

And if you get caught you get banned I know more than one major publication has been caught this way.

You don't always necessarily get banned permanently, or banned at all. Google might just discount all the links they find to be bought and adjust your ranking according to your new link count minus the paid links. You can always clean up the links yourself and then submit a reconsideration request. Whether that request is accepted, that's up to Google.

True but some times you do get a big slap BMW is probably the best known. And getting back can be a problem for sites with out a high profile and for ever after your on Googles watch list :-)

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