Written on Friday, January 26th, 2007 by lorien1973 :: 2 Comments so far

V7N - some forum/site I never visit, apparently has a new service where they sell contextual links. Cleverly, its url is: http://contextual.v7n.com/. Not knowing much about this, I assume its a service where you post up an offer asking bloggers to write about your site and, in turn, they’d link back to you. Much like Pay Per Post.

Matt Cutts brought it up in the sense that it is “undetectable spam” in reference to an errant email he had received. The whole post is kind of funny, actually. Cutts suggests that finding these links and discounting them is easy enough, programatically. Yeah right. Contextual links are, by far, the hardest to detect. As I’ve brought up in many forums, I could show up 100 pages and ask “are these purchased or natural links” and I bet you couldn’t guess more than 50% (which are your odds of getting any guess correct). Making a program to guess correctly is even harder.

I’m curious why Google simply doesn’t close the loophole that makes these schemes work. Discount anchor text. Google has taken the first step by finally fixing the “google bomb” problem.

Here’s my question to Cutts on this. Let’s assume you buy blog entries from blogs that get traffic. These blogs lead directly to traffic and sales for the target site. Blogger gets paid; target site increases traffic/revenue. Where’s the harm done? Now, if ‘links’ don’t help in Google (in terms of ranking, popularity, etc) who really cares. But, will Google actively penalize you for getting those links. That’s the question.