A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about Google selling links for a cheap annual price of $1,995. It was a story that I read some time ago but could not find the real owner, until today when Rustybrick sphunn what I had just sphunn and provided a link to the original story. I appreciate someone finally telling me who I could credit because I don’t like duplicating stories without giving kudos.
As I’m reading the comments on sphinn today, I see where people are saying the backlinks are not showing up. I would suggest they are not looking very hard. I researched several when I was blogging a couple of weeks ago and found the google backlinks on several of the domains. This made me want to do even more research today and I happened across even more google links that are essentially links that were bought. Oddly enough, the nofollow tag is absent on all of these. Something Google is forcing everyone to do if it is paid for in some fashion.
Now the original link farm style page was a hit and miss for finding google on their backlinks. Lucky for me, I stumbled on a gold mine of hard evidence they are nothing but hypocrites over at Google. Let me introduce the enterprise superstars!
http://www.google.com/enterprise/superstars/index.html
These people are Google customers who have paid for the Google Mini and because they paid, were recognized and highlighted. The first page is a list of the “Current Winners”. Each person from the respective company is highlighted and given a Pay for Post style write up on a Google blog. (example)
Now let us move on to the real gold, the success stories page. If there were doubts about passing juice before, this page should seal the deal with proof.
I did the daunting task of checking all 187 links on this page (umm..link farm?) and the results paint the picture:
- 171 of the domains have google.com appearing in their google backlinks.
- 10 of the domains do not have google.com in their google backlinks.
- 5 of the domains have no cache and/or no website present.
- 1 of the domains has a typo and the link does not work.
In summary, if you want a good solid backlink or even a backlink and a blog review on the google blog, then pay for the google mini and become one of their superstars.
I have put the entire list with results in this PDF called Google Link Selling if anyone wishes to check my work.
Their new motto should be, “Do As I Say, Not As I Do!”
9 comments ↓
nice work, dude. I have a sneaky suspicion that these links will soon be no-followed! GOOD.
someone finally “outed” Google for paid links! HAAAA!!!!
This is exactly why I have been a linkworth customer exclusively for the last 3 years.
Very well researched sir.
Somebody should get the google search team on this and drop that PR to 0 until they nofollow these.
[...] Well, it’s now time to report that my PR rank finally fell to zero. A big fat zero . At the time, I was surprised by the situation, and somewhat angry, esp. since Google was dictating what we could and couldn’t put on our blogs, and how we could monetize them. Naturally, this still irks when you realize that Google is themselves guilty of breaking their own guidelines. [...]
[...] More Hipocrisy By Google - Nofollow? — LinkWorth - Be Found Online In case anyone still believes they only wants what’s best for us. Subscribe to the RSS feed or get email updates var bz_url=’http%3A%2F%2Fchillycool.com%2Flinks-for-2007-12-01%2F’; var bz_num_comments=0; var bz_comment_date=”; var bz_bgcolor=’fff’; [...]
[...] have Ron over at Linkworth doing some serious competitive research on how Google sells pagerank AND site reviews. I’m not going to steal his thunder, but the post is a follow up to his original post about [...]
[...] read more | digg story [...]
This goes to show that the webmaster and marketing communities should not be afraid of marketing their talents and websites. Boo on Google.
my blog http://www.preblogging.com/ has been dropped to PR0. I don’t have any paid reviews and I don’t sell links, I do promote your services (among others) and now I am hit with a reduction of 4 PR points on some pages. Even the affiliate links are “nofollow”.
[...] so funny about it, you ask? If you’re aware of the whole Google Mini link debate you’ll know what I [...]
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