Has advertorials gotten out of control?

[bernard]

I'm back in the SEO game after almost 3 years out.

Imagine my surprise when I begin to check competitors and it's all backlinks from newspapers, magazines, etc. I mean, every.single.newspaper is selling these blatantly obvious advertorials now. Crazy! When I was in the SEO game, we would dream of buying an AAA+ newspaper link. Now it seems like you get them easily in bundles from any old link seller.

I can't imagine Google hasn't thought about this. What do you think?

 

[Future State]

Yeah, people are calling them "editorials." Trying to buy one is the fastest way to get scammed, although there was one guy in the Marketplace here who was legit. I bought a few from him last year but it looks like he's gone.

Google recently called out these practices publicly which led to a ton of sites going entirely nofollow. Google was previously dropping certain author accounts out of the index for selling them too. So they were on the trail and able to figure out which links were which.

I've seen so many scams though documented around the net. The main method is that you pay someone for the link, they give you the run around forever until you threaten to do a chargeback, and then they threaten to spam your site to death. Other methods include selling you links in noindex sections of the site where anyone can sign up, like on HuffingtonPost.

 

[bernard]

Ah ok, I guess small markets (countries) like mine can get away with stuff for longer. I am seeing a BOOM in these now.