By David A. Utter

Paid links, still dead

Search optimization pros bade farewell to paid links and other techniques after Google made certain changes through the past year.

While the demise of the paid link as a factor in PageRank hammered plenty of webmasters, there were other changes Google made that loomed in SEO over the course of the year.

SEO Roundtable picked up on a summary of these changes. Brett Borders at Copy Brighter summarized these in a blog post.

In the list, which included reciprocal and directory linking, the supplemental index, sponsored blog posts, subdomains, and the end of ten blue links per search result page due to universal search, Borders noted the paid links change, and how it used to be:

Not so long ago, it was possible to pick up the phone and call a major text link broker with open inventory and buy your way to good rankings. Now sites that openly sell links are coming under heavy fire. Top-secret brokers and hand-picked, carefully negotiated and camouflaged buys are the paid way in 2008.

Famed Googler Matt Cutts has stated publicly that Google can pick out disguised paid links. That leaves webmasters in search of a fast track to the top of the SERPs in a quandary. If they go the hush-hush buying route, will their efforts go for naught once Google decides those links may not be up to its quality standards, and penalizes the site?

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