How would google know whether they are paid links or not? I'm not certain there's that kind of capability.

Yeh, they probably wouldn't know. But if they find out, they won't be happy.

I have always wondered about large link selling sites (brokers) which display the name of the site you are buying a link from. Surely this is a gold mine for google, and they could identify dodgy links pretty fast.

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Sig: Before I post on Domain Social, I read the rules!

The best they can do is create a list of dodgy listing directories and penalize you if you're in one of those. Google doesn't mind if a directory is paid only as long as it's a quality directory, they pay huge respect to directories such as dmoz.

Also with the latest google update links are being assigned an age value, which means that if you get a PR8 link then it won't have full effect untill a couple of month have passed by, no one is really sure how long it takes, but the generally accepted value is 8 months.

What do you mean by they won't have "full effect"?

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Sig: Before I post on Domain Social, I read the rules!

Well when you first recieve the link, even though it might be a PR8 it won't have the same effect as a PR8 you've had for several months it might only give the same as a PR2 you've had for ages. Google call this link age, it's supposed to show that your site have been around longer and have been worth linking to for quite a while.

Very interesting, but it's another one of those google things I question from time to time ...for instance, if you have a very topical, hot site, you may get huge amounts of traffic immediately and then it can level off a few months down the line.

It's not just google who's using this, I seem to remember reading that yahoo is also using this, but in this case, I'm not sure.

I think you're right about Yahoo. I ran across that somewhere but can't remember where!!!

Wow. Thank you for posting this. I really enjoyed reading it. Thanks!

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angelbabyw2pointoh

It's one of those areas where I can't imagine google can track anything but bogus clicks as related to urls. But, any innovation google comes up with also doesn't surprise me.