Google Goes International in Paid Link Crack Down

Google is out for digital blood in an effort to maintain the integrity of its entire citation-driven (links) search ecosystem. 

In the last week alone, Google has penalized a French link network Buzzea for the use of paid links (see the official note from the company announcing it is voluntarily closing its doors) and most recently warned German webmasters using the tactic (which distorts PageRank) that link penalties for perpetrators are inevitable. 

Google's German Webmaster blog goes into detail about the types of links that can be seen as detrimental (detailed in its official Webmaster Guidelines) calling out guest blogging and link exchanges as examples, and addresses what webmasters should do when a manual spam action has been taken on their site (reconsideration requests). 

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