SEO Trend: Buying links to hosted pages
This week I’ve seen a number of “hosted pages” ranking very well in some nice search results. By hosted pages I mean pages that are promoting a certain company but are not published on the companies website. Examples include Squidoo pages and forum threads etc
This isn’t anything new but what is interesting is how many links the pages have. I’ve seen forum threads with up to 100,000 links that are not auto generated spam links but paid links. Some people are going out and spending thousands buying links to somebody elses domain to make a single page rank well on Google.
The problem with this strategy is that it isn’t a long term solution. Google (if it spots the pages) will remove them without hesitation making all the links worthless. They can also pretty much wipe out thousands of link selling sites in one fell swoop.
Another issue is that the owners of these domains face being given penalties (like Squidoo got) to stop them ranking so highly. Google knows that a certain percentage of Squidoo lenses are spam so they can’t give the site enough authority to rank for competitive queries.
Imagine if this was your forum and somebody pointed 100,000 links at it and you started ranking for some major search terms. What do you think Google would do?
