On Friday night, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts tweeted a link to a Gawker story named Shady Marketing Firms Are Still Quietly Bribing Bloggers. Matt said, “we’re taking action on hundreds of buyers, dozens of sites, & dozens of spammy writers,” in reference to that story.
It is hard to say if Google has taken action or is looking to take action in the near future against sites using this technique but it is clear, Google knows about it.
The technique is not about going to the site owner and selling links through the owner of the site. Instead, it is going directly to the reporter or blogger and getting them to “editorially” add links to sites without the site owner’s knowledge. It would be like one of you guys paying me to link to your site without the owner of this site knowing about that payment. You can read the dialog between the SEO who was doing the bribing and the blogger who outed them at Gawker.
Google’s Matt Cutts wrote they are “taking action on hundreds of buyers, dozens of sites, & dozens of spammy writers.” Now, this may be his way of frustrating spammers to break their spirits. Or it may be Google’s frequent manual actions on link sellers, buyers, networks and brokers.
Either way, when it comes to denying algorithm updates, Matt responded again saying “we try to avoid major algorithm updates near the holidays. But spamfighting always continues.”
This may imply that what webmasters saw on the 17th and 19th might be related to spamfighting efforts of Google?
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