Because it can’t accurately identify them. Frankly, I don’t have much against Google having something against paid links. It’s their search engine, they can do whatever they want with it. Of course I’d prefer they live and let live when it comes to paid links, for my own self-interest as someone who occasionally uses paid links as a way to build incoming links for my SEO clients.
But the problem is there’s no way for Google–I should say “no effective way”–to differentiate between a paid link and one that isn’t paid for.
For example, take my SEO firm’s corporate blog. There’s a linkage section on the left, with all sorts of links that apparently have nothing to do with the content on the blog. I mean, what does a pain pump attorney have to do with an SEO firm? Well, it happens to be one of our clients. Are they paying for the link? No, not as such. That is, they never arranged with us to have a link on that website. It’s not part of their contract. I could remove the link and they would still pay the same monthly fee for our services. But of course we want to help our clients however we can, so we add links to their sites on some of the web properties we own, like our Utah Firms site.
However, the Utah Firms site also has some paid links on it that are placed there through a text link broker who shall remain nameless. Can you tell which links are purchased and which aren’t? As a human being you might take a guess, and you might be right, but you might be wrong. And if Google is trying to develop software to figure it out, I can’t imagine how it would be able to detect paid links unless it can look at the source code prior to it being processed server side.
On many of MWI’s web properties if Google were to start penalizing the sites or the sites the links point to they would be penalizing “innocent” sites along with the “guilty” ones. And if they’re going to rely on informers, then they open the system up to a whole new front in terms of black hat SEO.
So in the end, can Google discriminate? I guess they can try, but so far I don’t see any evidence they can do it successfully without throwing the baby out with the SEO bathwater.
Wow, that was a really suckie, link stuffed article with incorrect information and on top of that outdated! Of course Google can tell a paid link….. when there’s a footprint from a link broker or a box with a bunch of irrelevant links that says sponsor links! I mean, DUH!!! Nice job smoothly squeezing in your two Client’s tla’s too, great relevancy of a topic for the both of them. HAHAHA!
Learn something. It’s called custom link building.
I think you missed the point of the post, which is that it isn’t hard to disguise a paid link. Link brokers can provide server-side scripting that doesn’t leave a footprint, and only an ignoramus would have a box that says “sponsor links”. Of course it’s easy for Google to spot a paid link if you make it obvious.
BTW – There aren’t any TLA’s in this post which just goes to emphasize the point that if you as a human being can’t recognize whether a link is a paid link or not, then how is Google going to do it programmatically?