SEO gossips: Google hires spies to report link sellers and manually penalises them

Came across this post on seomoz -

Does Google Employ Link Buying Moles? (see item 7)

Briefly speaking, buying links on topical highly ranking websites is one of the most powerful and easy-to-use methods for website promotion, which is however pertains to the category of grey-SEO techniques and is strongly frowned upon by Google, as this manupulates search engine rankings and is against Google’s webmaster rules.

You can imagine that with this technique being so powerful, link selling is a a very profitable web-business, which can bring webmasters good income for doing nothing but just placing links to other sites.

The post above by randfish reports that lately there have been indications from various companies that Google seems to hire moles to spy on people who sell links on SEO forums and other relevant resources, and then manually penalises the sellers.

So if you are in this business, watch out - do not give away your URL to anyone who requests it! The amount of risk reduces if you disclose your URLs only to forum members who have been registired for a sufficiently long time and have a high reputation. I would also recomend to check their posts and see if they are geniune webmaster and have been doing decent business for quite some time.

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