Anyone know whats going on here...?

[metaphase]

I did a backlink check on a competitors site, and they seem to have loads, I mean maybe hundreds, of links from blogs, that all follow the same sort of pattern.

They all seem to be articles, that end in a keyphrase and link of some kind that have nothing much to do with the post itself.

Whats going on here, are these paid links, is there lots of this around?

Is it a dodgy way to get links, or a little known secret?

I am intrigued.......

Thanks all.

[JohnW]

Garden variety spam. I don't think it is safe to do this if you were thinking of trying it out.

[kamalupatel]

can you please show the site....where i can check

you can PM me also

Thanks

[Greenkey]

Its possible they could be paid blog reviews. from a service such as sponsoredreviews.com without looking at the site it would be difficult to confirm.

[metaphase]

yeh sorry, they removed my link.

if it is sponsoredreviews, is this safe/standard way of buying links. Is it punishable by google?

Thanks

[mooreseo]

Technically it's punishable. But most likely what will happen is that Google will just devalue the site that the link is coming from rather than punish the site that is getting linked to. Otherwise, people could pay for links to their competitors to game the system and get their competitor penalized. It will amount to a whole lot of money spent on nothing (assuming Google finds it or someone reports it to them).

[JohnW]

>Otherwise, people could pay for links to their competitors to game the system and get their competitor penalized

exactly. It's a form of google bowling. It happens.