It is not so set in stone…

You can read a good debate on this related article from Aaron Wall: http://www.seobook.com/archives/001544.shtml

Many SEO’s seem split on this one, and to be honest it probably comes down to a million different factors.

So I definitely wouldn’t say I’m wrong as it can’t be proved. Unless you work deep in the Googleplex and know something I don’t?

“On the other hand I am pretty sure that if a site took up a very aggressive paid link building campaign Google may well penalize them by removing indexed pages from their SERPs.”

won’t happen

otherwise I am going to go do that to all my competitors.

…..

the difference with recip. link spamming is that you control who you link to, it cannot be sabotaged unless someone hacks into your backend

On the other hand I am pretty sure that if a site took up a very aggressive paid link building campaign Google may well penalize them by removing indexed pages from their SERPs.

This has already been done to sites engaging in aggressive reciprocal campaigns and I see Google eventually stamping down in a similar way against blatant paid links.

Brian, IMHO you also have a point there could be collateral damage. But I am unsure if Google would care, if they think it would give a better search performance and more relevant results, they may/will do it anyway.

Cheers,

Gary.

However I think what they would do to make what you mentioned work, is grandfather link wait currently to a certain degree. Then apply the devaluation to new inbound links, thus withholding there current SERP structure, and alleviating as much manipulation from here out.

Actually relevence aside, it’s still possible to detect alot of paid links.

Generally paid links appear in a grouping of 10 or 15 links and change often ie on a monthly basis. They are also generally grouped together in the footer or side bar.

Why would a link editorially awarded on content be changed monthly? Multiply this with the other 9 or 14 links in the cluster being different every couple of cached snapshots of the page and it gets easier to work out.

A relevent link imbedded in content that doesn’t alter signifies it’s naturally awarded more then a changing cluster doesn’t it?

Combine this with the fact that 1,000 links naturally awarded to a page is likely to have little repetition in the anchor because it’s not chosen by the page owner to influence rankings like it would if it was paid.

There’s other factors but in a nutshell if they started to not award weight to a link within a certain timeframe, and awarded basically no weight to clusters of external links that are removed from content and reduced their tolerence towards a high % of identical anchor text it would impact alot of the paid links.

As you can see it can be done without taking relevance in to account. I don’t think they will devalue paid links totally, but apply a dampening factor to the amount of weight it passes based on the number of red flags it raises.