Google Hates Undeclared Paid Backlinks

Published on October 1st, 2011 by Jeremy Chatfield

Tuesday, a client sends me an email asking if they should take advantage of an offer to buy a page on a directory on which they can create links. It’s accompanied by the email soliciting business, which includes a story about how a couple of businesses benefited, and the prices for pages at different tiers in the directory. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Here’s a screen shot of the results page for the search “the best links”, which is the name of the domain that was selling links:

But what was the number one listing on Tuesday and Wednesday has vanished by Friday:

What’s really remarkable is how thoroughly this site has vanished:

It’s usual for a site to have the home page as the first page in the sitelinks list. For the home page to vanish… well, looks like Google hates this site. And I wouldn’t bet on any rank being passed.

Unsurprisingly, none of the Google penalty checking websites that I could find suggest that there’s a problem with this site. After all, it has results in the listings. Just very low ranked and none of the top pages (like the home page) show up. Sure sign of a problem of some sort!

So, what happened? Well, the site was probably reported to Google, possibly even before I saw the solicitation. And Google acted, quite quickly.

If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, you can use Google’s Undeclared Paid Backlinks report form to report sites that are using and offering undeclared paid backlinks. I don’t know what you do if you aren’t a registered webmaster – perhaps find one and ask them?

So, what happened to the companies mentioned in the story? I can’t find them, now, either. Certainly not on page one of results (I’ve used the non-personal search on our tool to view Google organic and paid search as if in another country)

Google really isn’t happy with undeclared paid links. At all.