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Google's hunt for linkbuyers

Up until now, the linktrade was a rather harmless affair: in the last few years, Google depreciated the shown PageRank for linksellers who got caught which would (supposedly) prevent the inheritance of linkjuice, though normally, the ranking of the domain was not affected. Buyers got off even easier – besides of paying money for links which do not manipulate the index, they had nothing happen to them.

This seems to have changed at least partially in recent weeks. Since then, I am receiving numerous E-mails and calls from siteoperators whose domains have lost a massive amount of Google-traffic. Following are a few examples where I believe they crashed due to their “special” linkbuilding.


If we take a closer look at these cases, we will see that many of these domains are hit with a “+50-penalty”: nearly all rankings of the site are moved back by about 50 positions. When we try to locate the source of this, it soon becomes apparent that they have massively bought very cheap links in eastern-Europe. This is a subject matter that has been adopted by so many SEO-blogs that it seems Google felt impelled to act: besides the (customer)-domains, we also have one agency who relied too much on this kind of linkbuilding for their customers that they have been taken out of the race for keywords like “seo” or “suchmaschinenoptimierung” (searchengineoptimization).

The development in the next few month will be interesting: was this a one-time, planned action against this kind of linkpurchase or should we get used to Google sanctioning the purchase of links in the future, which would make it considerably harder for buyers to rank.