Natural Or Paid Links How Can They Tell

They cannot unless they have infiltrated the broker's inventory.

They can't.

Some will say that most sitewide links with a title of 'partners' or 'resources' or similar shouts paid, but it's speculation.

Unless there is a section of links on your site called "paid links...come and get me google..nah nah nah nah", it is almost impossible for them. I'm not saying it is 100% impossilbe, but generally its a risk that most people can take.

Tom

They can, if the patterns and footprints are there.

If you pay for a link on an independent site with very few links then you are safe as houses. If you pay a paid-link company then your chances of getting caught rise to "maybe", as those sites inevitably build networks and networks leave patterns and footprints.

For example, there is an auto-link network out there that when you install their link code on your site, it displays a default message. All google needs to do is filter indexed pages containing that text and then monitor them. When those sites suddenly get links on them google could follow them and find other sites, and follow their links etc. Its not foolproof but it is a footprint and a network google could limit if it chose to.

For blogs they look at blogroll links, if its no follow then you are fine..if you are getting paid for text link without no follow you are penalised

I'm sure they could determine if you paid for some links, but not all.

More to the point, if they could determine 100%, would they care? I don't think so. If you want to pay for links to improve you're rankings, go ahead. You shouldn't do it just for rankings however. Do it to get quality traffic from those links as well.

From my experience, (just because I am new to this forum, does not mean I am new to IM) Its not what they can prove, its what they want to believe.

They do look at things like a sidebar on the homepage linking to all kinds of random off the cuff sites, with remarkably helpful anchor text on do follow links,

they look at side wide links,

they look at the link graph of a sites outgoing link profile to determine how many of those "paid looking links" link to a sites homepage vs deeper pages,

all the basics, but the obviously dead give away is the whole "advertise here" type of text on a page...

Heres the funny thing, and this absolutely depends on the niche, those paid links still often pass a huge amount of value at least in the short term.

What I still do is the following.

If I still want the link but I don't want to be viewed as being a total spammer, I will set up my own very mini link wheel on domains I own on a set of separate c-class ip addresses, I will then pass the link on directly to my site through my buffer sites and have the link go to often a deeper internal page of one of my primary sites.

The link from the buffer site will be in content and obviously anchor text optimized to one of my inner primary site pages, from there the internal link strategy I have working internally on my site takes care of the rest.

If done properly, this works quite well and has so far survived the initial may day update and google caffiene changes, but that may also just be because so many of the competiting site have fallen off, and mine have taken their place.

I have not actually put a whole lot of time into looking, as I am more focused on getting more aff offers up on new pages.

Let me know your findings, always interested in seeing how others are doing things, I am sure like many I can end up with a bit of tunnel vision.