Bought, swapped and scattered links
Google treats a link as a recommendation. Buying links, swapping them in bulk or scattering them in comments amounts to rigging recommendations, and the penalty hits both parties. Punished practices series, part three.
The part on internal linking showed that a link passes on importance. Links from other sites pass on even more: Google reads them as recommendations, a site that cites another vouches for it. A whole industry has therefore been built on a simple idea: manufacturing fake recommendations. That is what the spam policies call link spam.
The faces of the link trade
Direct purchase, first: so many francs for an article containing your link on a third-party site. The pitch arrives by email, often in English, increasingly in French: “we offer sponsored posts with a dofollow link”. The rule is explicit: buying or selling links for ranking purposes is a violation, and that includes payment in kind, a free product in exchange for a linked article.
Swapping, next: “link to me and I’ll link to you”. Two bakers who cite each other because they know each other, that’s the normal web. Dozens of cross-exchanges organized for ranking, directories built for that purpose, “partners” in the footer who were never partners: that is the scheme the rule targets, the facade partnership whose only product is the link.
Scattering, finally: dropping your link wherever a text field will take it, blog comments, forums, signatures. Google files it under the same spam, and the practical outcome is well known: most sites mark those spaces with attributes that neutralize the links, so you harvest the risk without even the hoped-for benefit.
Why the penalty is heavy, and for whom
The rigged link doesn’t only deceive the searcher: it poisons the measuring instrument itself, the part of the ranking that rests on what sites say about one another. That is why the response is severe and strikes both ends: the site that sells its recommendation loses its ability to give one, the site that buys it sees its links ignored or its ranking fall, and the manual action for unnatural links is one of the most common.
The client’s trap is the same as in the previous part, only worse: “link building” packages for a few hundred francs scatter links you know nothing about, on sites you will never see, and the cleanup, link by link, costs more than the campaign did. Always ask a provider for the exact list of links created and where they come from; a refusal is an answer.
What remains allowed, and is enough
Earning links is not forbidden, that is the whole point: what gets punished is manufacturing them. The links that count come from the reality of your business: the association you belong to, the local press covering your worksite, the supplier listing its resellers, the club you sponsor, genuinely. A Swiss SME site doesn’t need a hundred links; it needs ten true ones, and those can’t be bought, they are earned over time.
Next part: cloaking, or the art of showing the robot a different page than the visitor, and its cousin, the sneaky redirect.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.