My competitor uses paid links. Links are manually placed, but he is buying it from an agency that sells links for lots of other clients so if any flags are raised, it is obvious that it is unnatural.

Anchor text is the biggest clue. Most people link without anchor text. Myself and our other competitors do not get much anchor text aside from articles in our own blogs, articles and other writings we do ourselves.

Agency uses lots of small blogs and places links for other clients on the same site.

The competitor who buys links has 181 domains linking to him with the anchor “allergy relief”. 147 domains linking with “allergy bedding” 72 domains with “Allergy Mattress Covers” anchor link.

I looked at a bunch of them. Each blog that i looked at had a quickie post of a single paragraph and was off-topic. They all also had anchor text with similar characteristics for weight loss pills, insurance and other sites. Nearly all had a boilerplate disclosure somewhere on the site that they accept compensation and may be influenced by it.

Other than the three phrases that this competitor targeted, they have no other anchor text (aside from their company name) from more than 3-4 domains. In other words each of these three phrases has dozens of anchor text links with desired text while no other phrases have more than 3 or 4.

They are getting some movement. They pulled this off by getting the links over time. 20-30 domains per month. Many of these domains arent crawled that often so a couple of new links per month is enough to crawl under the radar until it is discovered.

It looks like Google is checking newly crawled pages for red flags.

In totality, it looks obvious. Everyone else in the industry has few anchor text links. They are getting hundreds and by some odd coincidence all the bloggers linking to them are choosing one of these three phrases.

If 20 people were to link to you what are the odds that all 20 will use anchor text at all? The exact same text?

Once the red flag is raised and you take a closer look at the blogs linking out with the anchor text that is off topic, you see them doing so for lots of other sites and the full network is detected.

That is the biggest weakness, blog linking to you with paid anchor text of your choosing is doing so for others as well and more than likely working with some SEO firms.

You made a lot of good points. I think that is obvious that links are not “organic”or “natural” when the links come from sources that are irrelevant to the topic at hand. I know I have had many links to my blog I have had to get rid of as spam.
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