Brighton SEO talk on How To Identify Your Competitions Paid and Sponsored Backlinks

2. Chris Byrne
www.seolondonsurrey.co.uk

4. Sites that rank well on Google in my
experience often buy or sponsor links to
their sites as the number / quality of links
to a site is widely considered to be one of
Google's three major ranking factors:
http://bit.ly/3oZhoEF

6. 2012 – Google ‘Penguin’ Update

8. Google states that “buying or selling
links that pass PageRank can dilute
the quality of search results.
Participating in link schemes
violates the Google Webmaster
Guidelines and can negatively
impact a site's ranking in search
results.”

9. Link schemes

11. ”Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a
site's ranking in Google search results may be
considered part of a link scheme and a violation
of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. This includes
any behavior that manipulates links to your site or
outgoing links from your site.”

13. 2019

14. Based on my experience since 2012 working
on various sites with ranking drops and one
with a formal ‘unnatural link penalty’ from
Google:
Google isn’t good at detection of all paid
links, often only detecting the egregious link
networks with widespread ‘money keyword’
anchor text abuse (with multiple websites
possibly on the same IP address).

15. Why Identify Your Competitors’ Sponsored /
Paid Links?

16.  As part of competitor analysis, to potentially
copy their link building strategy
 To do unpaid work for GOOG by reporting these
links to undermine your competitiors

19. Note if you are buying or selling links for
your client or own site, reporting your
competitors’ paid and sponsored links to
Google may cause your (client’s)
backlink profile to be scrutinised by
GOOG as well .

20. Google SEO is in my experience working to
create multiple incremental (sometimes
marginal) improvements, and the basis of
this is understanding implementing the
Google Webmaster guidelines especially in
relation to user experience, the fundamental
aspect of which being quality information.
This same knowledge will help you
scrutinise & undermine the competition.

21. How To Buy / Sponsor Links in A
Google-Compliant Way

22. “You can prevent PageRank from passing in
several ways, such as:
1. Indicating the link is sponsored adding a
qualifying attribute to the <a> tag
2. Redirecting the links to an intermediate
page that is blocked from search engines
with a robots.txt file”

23. How to Identify Some of your
Competitors' Paid / Sponsored
Links*
* This will only include the links
indexed by backlink checker tools

24. These posts sometimes have some or all of
the following characteristics:
1. they look out of place e.g. a post on
“Digital Marketing Tips” on a Weddings blog
2. do not have an author name / byline /
bio . The article may be labelled as a guest
blog, “paid promotion” or similar

27. 3. have ‘money’ keyword-rich anchor text
for the external links like 'best seo
consultants london'
4. selectively 'nofollow' certain external
links on the page for no apparent reason

28. Example

29. To identify
your competitors' paid /
sponsored links:
1. Review / export a list of their
backlinks using your backlink
checker of choice.

30. 2. Sort the list by 'nofollow' tag and
/ or anchor text if the export allows,
or you can check this manually in
your browser with a plugin like
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
GB/firefox/addon/nofollow-
advanced/ .

31. 3. Check the pages are still live
with a tool like https://httpstatus.io/
4. Manually review the pages in
question with Linkrr.com (a tool to
open backlinks in bulk – you may
need to adjust your browser settings
-it works in Firefox) and revise your
list as appropriate!

33. Google asks if you believe a site is engaged
in buying or selling links that pass PageRank
to tell them about it :
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/p
aidlinks?pli=1

34. TLDROL
As well as the GOOG, Bing and
Yahoo guidelines there are the rules
/ laws of e.g.
ICANN
UK Advertising Standards Authority
UK Competition and Markets
Authority etc

35. The basis of Google SEO is understanding
& implementing the Google Webmaster
Guidelines especially in relation to user
experience, the fundamental aspect of which
being supplying quality information for the
user. This same knowledge will help you
scrutinise the competition. Google
encourages us to report violations of it’s
guidelines.

36. For these slides and further
guidance r.e. Bing & Yahoo
www.seolondonsurrey.co.uk/blog

37. Sign up to my newsletter at
www.seolondonsurrey.co.uk/blog
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