Google knows about your backlinks

Google knows probably a lot more than you think.

This is a blog post by Matt Cutts (Google Engineer): “Tell me about your backlinks”

Google might not like that text links are being bought but in my opinion I see no problem with that. You pay for advertising, just like adwords.

Now, I agree that Google should take actions to devalue etc to keep their index clean - that is part of the SEO cat-and-mouse-game

Some advices:

1. Don’t have words such as “sponsored links” near the links that you buy.
2. Have the sites you buy links on on different IPs.
3. Don’t exaggerate it by getting thousands overnight.
4. Vary the anchor text, make it look natural.
5. Link inside the text is better than sitewide in the footer.

Now, run away from the Google cat