Link Spam
Any buying, exchanging, or manufacturing of links whose purpose is to influence ranking rather than to reference something genuinely useful.
Analogy Mental model
Buying votes in a contest. Whatever the mechanism, it is not a vote, and everyone involved knows it.
In practice What you actually do
The documented violations are specific and recognisable: paying or giving goods and memberships in exchange for a followed review, hiding keyword-rich links in the footer of a widget or template you distribute, contractual obligations to link, and automated link generation at scale.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
If you send free product to a creator for review, the arrangement now falls under advertising rules as well as search policy. The link must be marked as sponsored or nofollow and the gift disclosed near the top of the piece.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →