Google is turning its focus on cracking down on link networks to Germany. Matt Cutts hinted at this last week when he announced that the company was taking action on French link network Buzzea, and noted in another Tweet that Germany was also on the list of places Google’s looking at.
Google has now put out a blog post about paid links (in German), which Cutts tweeted a link to:
A reminder (in German) that paid links that pass PageRank violate our guidelines: http://t.co/u1MpvL7kh4
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) February 3, 2014
So don’t be surprised to see Cutts tweeting about specific link networks out of Germany in the near future.
Google has always advised against paid links that pass PageRank, but in recent months, the company has put a seemingly increased focus on the issue. Last summer, they put out a new series of videos to further extend the anti-unnatural link message.
There have been a handful of publicized cases of networks penalized recently. In addition to Buzzea, we’ve seen BackLinks.com, Anglo Rank, Rap Genius and even Expedia penalized for linking practices since December.
Image via Google