Even if you feel very confident that paid links are winning the battle for your archnemesis

[zihadhasan019]

There's no metrics indicating whether the link is passing juice, no metric for trustworthiness or quality, just a notation that a link exists on the page. Even if you're using something more advanced like Linkscape, there's nothing to say which links Google counts and which they don't. You can easily get pulled into the idea that paid links are what's propping up the competition's rankings, when in fact, it's a few great natural links that are doing all the heavy lifting.


I remember a site clinic several years back featuring taiwan email list a Google's webspam chief, Matt Cutts. He was reviewing a site's link profile on stage using an internal tool and commented that while Google saw several hundred links to the site, only three (yes 3 out of hundreds!) were passing link equity. Cearly, the search giant does a tremendous amount of filtering on the web's link graph, so don't presume to be sure which links are passing value.






I recommend taking the low-risk road. In the long run, they're likely to get penalized/devalued and you're likely to overtake them with a link profile that's clean and continually increasing in value. Where do you draw the line between money that's spent to acquire a link indirectly (as with event sponsorship, ads that turn into links, etc.) This gets at the crux of the issue, but I think I've got a reasonably good methodology for determining which links requiring funds fit with Google's guidelines and which violate them.