How to Get Away with Paid Links? Buy where Google Does!

Benjamin Franklin on a 100 Dollar bill is watching sadly.

One day I was awestruck when I visited the site of most important German blogging conference re:publica.

Why was I so flabbergasted? The re:publica site sold links.

Paid links are frowned upon by Google since 2007!

Google has repeatedly asked publishers to report paid links aimed at manipulating Google’s ranking algorithm.

This post was first published in 2011! Yet it still works! Here’s how.


Whoa! Google itself buys links!

The more astounded I was when I discovered that Google itself buys links!

Google itself, Google.de to be more exact had a paid link on the conference page.

It was right there on the homepage. Here is a partial screenshot:

Sony Google

On top of that the links were easily identifiable as “sponsors”.

Google paid links

In the HTML code the site clearly states that the links are paid for.

When I looked at the source code ! was quite sure that I overlooked the obligatory “nofollow” attribute.

Why use nofollow? You have to add to sponsored links to stay within the Google guidelines.


Bug or feature? Did Google manipulate themselves?

“It must be a mistake” I thought!

Nobody who is into online publishing would so blatantly ignore the rules! So I took a closer look.

I mean, after all, these people, the blogging elite of Germany are Internet savvy professionals. They have to know it.

Also why would Google manipulate itself? After all they should abide by their own rules first and foremost!

The more I was dumbfounded when I discovered the actual source code.

In it you can clearly see anchor text that doesn’t show up on the page itself.

You don’t even see the anchor text onsite. It’s hidden.

You can see images only – that is the logos of the companies buying links at re:publica. In the source code it says though:

<ul class="sponsors kooperationspartner">
<li><a target="_new" href="http://www.sony.de/" title="Sony">Sony</a></li>
<li><a target="_new" href="http://www.google.de">Google</a></li>;

As you these are not only paid links.

This site and with it Google itself violate the Google guidelines by using hidden text as well.

It’s one of the oldest spam techniques there are on the Web. Here the site uses a CSS trick to hide the text.

What does this mean? Has Google revised its stance on paid links? Are paid links OK now that Google buy links itself?

I don’t know what to believe by now. In the past Google departments all over the world have been caught buying links but in most cases they had a good excuse.

What’s the excuse here? Were Google.de and re:republica get penalized by Google? Nope.

This blog is probably not important enough to make Google.de and the German blogging elite revise their site.

Thus I asked some more important publications to cover this story as well.

I reached out to Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land to get a clarification whether it’s a mistake.


Double standards when it comes to large brands?

As far as I’m concerned I don’t think it’s OK to force the little guy to remove paid links while allowing huge corporations to do so:

  • HP
  • Sony
  • Google itself.

They seem to buy links with hidden anchor text to manipulate Google and search results.

Is it only fine when global brands do it then?

It smells like double standards.

Btw.: re:publica sold links all over the site, not just on the homepage. There were dozens of them. It’s not just one of two.

Of course you can become a cynic and consider site that sell links to Google as a save haven from now.

Whenever you want to buy links on high PageRank sites make sure to do it on sites that sell to Google as well.

P.S.: The developers of re:publica knew what nofollow is.

They had links on the homepage that use nofollow. They used nofollow on links from social updates.

Coverage on Search Engine Roundtable – ridicule on social media

I indeed convinced Barry Schwartz to post about this issue more than once. I can’t find the original re:publica post though.

Yet my impression was that both he and most commentators were not really taking it seriously.

There was a lot of ridicule. Just read the comments below Barry’s posts linked above.

I also pointed out that re:publica was not the only site that did that the first time already.

It’s indeed quite possible to find lots of sites with paid links to Google that don’t use the “nofollow” or “sponsored” attributes.

I won’t disclose them here. Let’s just take another look at the examples I shared publicly in the past (2011, 2016 and 2018).


Where to buy links and get away with it? Where Google does!

It’s easy to find more examples of sponsored links by Google and other sites along them. I did publicly a few times ever since!

The paid links reported here in 2018 are still not marked as “sponsored” or using “nofollow”:

Both Let’s Encrypt and FOSDEM still do not add “nofollow” to sponsor links.

Re:publica also sells links without “nofollow” again in 2025.

They just don’t call them “sponsors” anymore and Google is not one of them by now.

On Let’s Encrypt only the Google Chrome link has the attribute almost a decade later.

So you don’t have to be cynical to learn a lesson from this!

When buying links the best way to get away with it is to buy them where Google does.

This way you are on the safe side and can claim that you are just following Google’s footsteps.

Of course I would never advise you to break the rules as I’m too ethical for that.

So this is not really a post on “how to buy links safely”. It’s humorous to some extent.

This article is only meant to uncover the wrongdoing by others.

When you break the rules do it at your own peril.

This blog has been penalized by Google back in 2011 and never fully recovered. I still deal with the effects of that.

I never found out why. Maybe I was too critical of Google?

Or maybe they categorized my tiny SEO directory as “paid links”. Who knows? I’m not Sony or HP so I won’t find out probably.

Strange coincidence btw.! This article was published originally on April 11, 2011 – the same year Google demoted this blog for good.

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