Ever since Google's highest spam-guardian announced the war against buying and selling of links in the beginning of the year, not much has – objectively – happened. You can now fill out a form in the Webmastertools to report sites that sell links and the Google-guidelines were adjusted accordingly. The link-market keeps growing unfazed, by now, textlinkbrokers like TLA or Linklift are seen by many as a means of “legitimate” advertising and are being used numerously. Except for a very few sites, whose inheritance was turned off years ago, it seems that Google has not yet implemented any steps to put their money where their mouths are considering the announcements in the beginning of this year.

If, today, we take a look at strongly competitive SERPs (which are usually also of commercial interest), such as those for “Datenrettung” (data-recovery), we will notice that the number of sites that “bought” their position is on the rise. The current top three sites for data-recovery all seem to have in common that they know very well where to buy links: OpenSource-sponsorsites, content-management- or also forum-systems are represented there – PageRanke and “trust”. Despite of this, we have the relevance of these sites to the searchquery. It is also rather unlikely, that a websiteoperator will buy links for a not-so-small amount of money just to scare the visitors off with content that does not convert. Many of the “Moneykeys” (searchqueries which can be used to make money) are looking similar to this example, at the moment.

Google is in a difficult situation here: If bought links are generally de-evaluated, there should be a decline in the quality of the SERPs in those areas that links are being bought in. The realistic share of voluntary links on the Internet that link to an insurance agency with “private insurance” should be in the lower, single-digit percent-margin of the entirety of links – if 95% of the links used to measure ranking suddenly disappear, there should be consequences for the index. We can be sure that Google will have already played this through with test-data and the fact that they have not followed up on their marked announcements about linkpurchase could show that this subject might not be resolved by a simple black-or-white contemplation.