• BlogStorm , Monday, January 14, 2008 12:44 PM

Using a list of 10 auto insurance info Web sites, Patrick Altoft aims to illustrate that Webmasters are still using paid links to drive traffic and boost PageRank--and that this technique may be one of the best (or only) ways to compete in such a particularly competitive niche.

Some may call it "outing," and others may call it plain old investigative journalism, but Altoft includes the link analysis (via the "-site:" search parameter) of each site, and points to the fact that some of their inbound links come from properties with no good reason to link to them--other than being paid to do so.

90srockers.com for example, is a site devoted to pre-millennium alternative rock bands--yet you'll find a set of links to various car insurance sites nestled into a banner-style section at the bottom of the page.

Altoft maintains that he does not know whether the links being passed are paid for, and that Google probably doesn't. But if asked, the search giant's Ads Quality team would likely say that the sites were ranking purely on merit--since they actively detect and discount the effects of any kind of paid linking scheme.

Read the whole story at BlogStorm »