I’ve posted countless reminders about not sending your link buy and sale requests to Google or Googlers but some really fearless link sellers and buyers keep on doing it. This time they emailed Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, with several examples of their “undetectable” links they have for sale to help boost your Google rankings.
Danny Sullivan posted about it on the Search Liaison X account saying, “We got mail! Buying & selling links for ranking purposes is against our spam policies.” He added, “If someone says they’re undetectable, Google would never know, remember. They might be making the same pitch to us here at Google with actual URLs for us to check.”
He shared a snippet of part of the email chain:
John Mueller said it is easy and SpamBrain for links just works:
The links that people build are just as easy for our systems to recognize and ignore, or demote for. Spambrain just doesn’t have a Twitter account.
— John has updated his unnamed profile name #stapler (@JohnMu) August 30, 2023
A couple of years ago, I posted a PSA from Gary Illyes of Google saying Google will use those link spam emails against you, so stop emailing them to @google.com email addresses. Like I said, this is not the first time Google has said this. Gary Illyes from Google in 2017 where someone emailed him about link buying based on DA. Heck, even in 2016, someone emailed Matt Cutts with paid link requests. This also happened in 2012 to another Googler who was on that team. I am sure it happens way too often. It is just not smart to ask Googlers who work on Google Search to break their own webmaster guidelines.
Forum discussion at X.
