Despite the fact that selling paid links can hurt your search engine rankings, It seems that the Express group are selling BUCKETLOADS paid links.. to online gambling spammers. It’s not so long ago that other media / newspaper groups were caught, outed and punished for selling links.
e.g. Bingoport is buying links on the Express newspaper website and OK website (to name but a few) (notice the dofollow links, also deeplinking to pages so that the buyer can rank/brand parasite in the SERPs).
Manipulating google SERP rankings via paid links is nothing new – but it’s noteworthy because once again a big newspaper is doing it. No doubt, as usual nothing will happen because google is “broken” and spamming goes unpunished in 999999.999% of cases.
Maybe these newspapers will start selling to porn and pill sites too, if the price is right… Money is money right?
Have you seen any other newspapers selling gambling links? Name and shame! =)
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I’d love to know what the risk to cost benefit is for sites like the Express. Surely they are only getting a few hundred quid a month tops for links like that. I also wonder if the head honchos know what risk they are running doing it.
Can I please ask though, what do you mean by “so the buyer can rank/brand parasites in the SERPs”? I see they are deep linking to a page with a number of different brands on it. Do you mean just to get this type of page ranking?
hey mark
I’d say the head honchos know rightly, b/c I tweeted at them asking them if they were employing idiots and trying to get banned from Google etc.
Your interpretation was correct for 2nd part. Thanks for reading / commenting :)