It’s disheartening to see high Page Rank blatant paid links helping sites rank in the SERPS. It seems right after you work so hard to build links ‘the right way’ that Google approves, you see this crap leap past you in the SERPS and give you the flaming finger as it settles down a few spots above you.
In an industry I’m competing in, a site has taken it’s place in the top 10 using primarily purchased links in sections labeled ‘sponsored links’ or ‘paid links’ that are off topic and clearly spammy. The links don’t have no follow and the target site’s neighborhood includes such esteemed industries like Russian Girls, Australian Online Pharmacies, and Discount Prescriptions.
It makes you wonder how far away Google is from being able to detect spam and when it will actually not be worth it for webmasters to buy links from off topic high pr sites. Because from what I can see, they’re not even close. As Google works a lot with probabilities and patterns, I really don’t think that they can decipher spammy links on highly trusted domains yet unless they’re manually reported. It seems since Google update Dewey that links that would not have counted in the past are being given credit in the document scoring process.
I could report them to Google and watch them be stricken from the index, but that does me no good long term and I’m sure the corresponding karma (I’m a big believer …) would come back to bite me in the back.
Has anybody else seen similar results, or am I totally missing the boat here?