Why google not penalise sites involve in buying and purchasing links as Google considers buying links to be outside of their guidelines ? Or google is going to penalise them very early as Matt Cutts indicated that "Google might take action" if webmasters buy links anyway.

I doubt that Google intend to punish sites simply for buying links, as there is nothing inherently wrong with doing that. I think they intend merely to stop giving any SEO value to those links so that their SERPs can't be manipulated by them.

What gringo said. There's nothing inherently wrong with buying links, and it would be too easy for a scumbag to get a competitor penalized by buying links. So it wouldn't be a punishment as such...more a devaluation than anything.

The problem is that most SEO wannabes got their shorts in a knot because they perceived it the way you did (buying links goes against Google's guidelines). What big G is after, and has always been after, are the "PR(x) Link For Sale" or "Exchange SEO links with my SEO friendly site" or that crap.

I'm wondering why you asked the question the way you did. It's almost like you're saying "why does X site rank above mine when they bought links and that's not what Google wants?" You just haven't told us what X site is yet.

Google might have a hard time fixing their algos to detect paid links... It smart-*** SEOs will surely find their way around when the big G penalized their website..

As what I had heard/read google do "punish" site who selling links, (if they find them) what you can do to add a rel="nofollow" because Google wants to exclude those links in their count when it counts links for google pagerank.

(correct me if i'm wrong on this, but its just I have think I have collected of information around the internet).

How would they know if some one purchased itanyway? They're against buying large amount of links at a time? So if you buy a hundred links from somebody they will penalize you? But if you buy a few a day it doesn't matter

Where on Earth did you get the idea that speed has anything to do with paid links and spamdexing?

What if you buy 10 links a day, but Google doesn't crawl any of the pages they're on for 2 weeks, then to them it looks like you got 140 all at once? You do realize they don't scan all of the web in realtime, right?

There's a principal called Occum's Razor, that says if there are 2 ways to explain something, the less crazy is probably correct.

They already do that, huh

John the speed thing is a reference to the idea that a site that picks up too many links too quickly is gaining links unnaturally. Google can measure how quickly or slowly a site gains links and compare that against a norm.

I don't know if Google really can do that tho?

Consider if I bought 500 links a day to my site. Lets say I get them

• 100 a day from a link farm I created, but it only gets crawled 1 time per month
• 50 a day from a social media site that uses dofollow links but is crawled 1 time every week
• 75 a day from blog comments, even on blogs that are crawled pretty often, except I'm getting links from their inner pages which don't get crawled nearly as often
• 275 a day from forums, again where the home page is crawled like every hour but the pages for each thread are more like every few days at best

Google won't know when I actually got any of my links. Only when they found them. Sure, they'll come to one source rarely, and see a huge pile of links to my site, and that also might look unnatural. But they won't know how many I'm getting how quickly or even close to it. After day 1 when I have 500 new links, it will take up to a month for a lot of them to even be seen by Google.

I have a hard time believing the idea that Google will punish you for getting a lot of links very quickly, mainly because they don't really have all the information at the right time to even make that determination. Plus, getting out of the raw details, I'm not even sure it makes sense to.

Remember when YouTube was launched? They got 1000s of links per hour from every site that let people post things. Forums, blogs, social networks, Craigslist, et cetera. They took the world by storm because they had popular content people wanted. That's exactly what Google loves to see. I never heard anything about YouTube being punished in Google (except maybe by cashing a check?) but I think it demonstrates the ideal for what lots of links quickly represents?

I don't think the speed of new links is really considered.
For example, if something cool is featured on a news site, and thousands of people link to it on their sites and blogs as a result of discovering it... That page will gain a huge number of links in just a few days.

A page like that probably *is* relevant to a search on whatever its topic is.

The (crazy) theory that a lot of links in a short time created some kind of "penalty" was originally dreamed up by the "Launch a site with thousands of links" & "crash & burn" people.
These people were used to being able to buy site-wide links on huge sites (or use their own multi-site networks) to have a site appear high (and stay high) in SEs (Google mainly) within a very short time frame.
Then along came the so-called "sandbox".
In true style the "experts" got it wrong! They assumed that it was a "proving ground" that new sites were put "into" and not allowed to appear in the SERPs at all.
And because sites launched with thousands of links no longer appeared it was "obviously" a penalty for lots of links.

What they failed to see is that it is the discovered links that are held back from passing rank weight until they are "trusted". This is why some sites will "escape" the aging delay simply because the links they get are from already "trusted" or reliable sources.
The proven link selling sites will never become a trusted source from now onwards. So if you buy links, buy them for the visitor value.

John I think you're trying to look at the time thing in too fine a detail. I agree Google can't necessarily know exactly when you picked up a link for every link. They are getting much faster at crawling the web though. You can often see pages indexed in under an hour.

But if you step back from looking at specific links Google should be able to easily see that a site is gaining 100 links per day or 500 links per week. True that not every link Google discovers today was gained today, but as you look at the averages over a larger time frame those things start to even out.

Let me try an analogy. Say I make a deposit in the bank every Friday of $500. If you look at one deposit it tells you nothing specifically about whether I earned that money during the previous week. Maybe I'd been hiding it under my mattress for the last six months.

But if you look at my series of deposits over the course of a few months and you notice they're all typically between $475 and $525 you can probably guess my next week's deposit will be about the same. Clearly it doesn't have to be for a variety of reasons, but it would be an anomaly.

Say after six months of always making similar deposits all of a sudden I started depositing $5,000 daily. Wouldn't that set off some kind of flag? Doesn't mean I've done anything wrong, but wouldn't it cause you to ask some questions if you'd been following my usual weekly deposits?

Why can't a search engine make similar kind of observations about links. Sure you might pick up a link today from a page that won't get crawled for a few weeks, but that one link doesn't throw off anything significantly. If a search engine found 100 or 101 links to your site next week what's the difference.

On the other hand if your site routinely gains 100 new links a month and then all of a sudden gains 10,000 in one month couldn't that raise a flag. There could be legitimate reasons a site suddenly gains a lot of links, but you still might want to take a closer look.

You mentioned YouTube gaining a lot of links. Have they all of a sudden stopped gaining links completely? No. They still gain tons of links. I wouldn't look at links/time as an absolute, but rather as a comparison to the norm for a given site.

A search engine could certainly look at your site and say on average they find 100 links/month. If that number changes significantly for any reason why couldn't it set off a flag? The key word being significantly.

Originally Posted by vangogh

Let me try an analogy. Say I make a deposit in the bank every Friday of $500. If you look at one deposit it tells you nothing specifically about whether I earned that money during the previous week. Maybe I'd been hiding it under my mattress for the last six months.

But if you look at my series of deposits over the course of a few months and you notice they're all typically between $475 and $525 you can probably guess my next week's deposit will be about the same. Clearly it doesn't have to be for a variety of reasons, but it would be an anomaly.

Say after six months of always making similar deposits all of a sudden I started depositing $5,000 daily. Wouldn't that set off some kind of flag? Doesn't mean I've done anything wrong, but wouldn't it cause you to ask some questions if you'd been following my usual weekly deposits?

Seems to work pretty well for the Federal Marshalls, I guess.

Originally Posted by vangogh

Why can't a search engine make similar kind of observations about links.

No reason. I guess when you look at patterns instead of instances it makes sense.

Originally Posted by vangogh

You mentioned YouTube gaining a lot of links. Have they all of a sudden stopped gaining links completely? No. They still gain tons of links. I wouldn't look at links/time as an absolute, but rather as a comparison to the norm for a given site.

They haven't stopped. But there was a time when they started. I'd bet for a long while the domain was registered, may or may not have been "leaked" and picked up by Google, and crawled but with nothing much to find. Maybe not. But at some point it went from about 0 links to about 1 million a day. For perfectly legit reasons. I'm sure there are times when they still spike - maybe after an important debate in politics, or a sporting match.

Originally Posted by vangogh

A search engine could certainly look at your site and say on average they find 100 links/month. If that number changes significantly for any reason why couldn't it set off a flag? The key word being significantly.

Well now that you've explained it in a way that makes sense to me, I have to agree. I don't think it indicates something bad, tho, just something. A successful link bait is an example of a link spike. Spam of some type is another example, and I guess I don't have any way to know which is more common.

Thanks for hearing me out and then trying another way of putting things after seeing what I'm confused with, by the way.