I think that businesses who can afford to pay 4 digits for mentions on top authorities have some real value, and G won't touch them. I think that G would not bother with these couple dozen links and invest time & money on investigation since there are thousands of PBNs, SAPE and other networks used by majorities (thousands), right?
Making a hollow threat ("reminding publishers" to turn down "bribes") is basically free. Of course they're not
actually going after paid guest posts. When done correctly, it's pretty fucking close to impossible to tell the difference algorithmically. Instead, spend just a little bit of money making dense threats about how you might get penalized, fired, or whatever and you'll get a great ROI -- random journalists don't actually understand SEO, which is what they're hoping for here.
And you're right about there being bigger (and easier) link building schemes to address. Search engines have to have some level of tolerance for spam in that "whitehat" and "blackhat" SEO are a huge fucking grey blur.
That Outline article is very well written. The fact that Google has noted it will likely trickle down to a far stronger crackdown on paid editorial postings. Between this and the rampant noindex issue with large publications, that industry is sounding a death rattle. Thoughts?
The "editorial link" ("""editorial""") industry is well and good because, really, it doesn't even fucking matter if it works for SEO because you can make more money https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/daily-reminder-that-the-huff-po-contributer-scam-is-still-a-thing.981352/ than you can selling a much, much larger number of these articles to people who are actually aware of their value (probably like $50-$100). Shitty editorial links will always thrive because the real money is in selling to people who don't know any better.
And the actual quality paid backlinks aren't going anywhere -- it's damn near impossible to detect them algorithmically, if not completely impossible. When done correctly, paid links (paid guest posts, basically) are exactly the same as "real" "whitehat" links.
Will Google do a crackdown? As I mentioned in reply to
@samrichards, search engines are pretty limited in terms of what they can do to algorithmically stop these types of editorial links. They might make a big show and dance about a sting operation type of thing or whatever and be like "yo ho ho we're coming for your editorial links, mother fuckers!" But, really, that's just them waving their dicks around - it's cheap and easier to scare journalists.
This is the exact business model of all automotive magazines. What's the big deal? You pay someone to write an article favoring your product. They publish it. Their readers trust them for opinions.
The Advertorial has been around long before SEO...
This is also true. And the interesting thing is that paying for a feature story that happens to include a link back to your site is whitehat/"whitehat." According the official guidelines from Google, building links is only blackhat if it's done specifically to boost your rankings. If you just happen to pay for a story that just happens to include a link to your site but aren't doing it for SEO purposes, that's technically completely in line with the webmaster guidelines.
Which, incidentally, is one more reason why it's fucking impossible for Google to do any kind of meaningful crackdown/"crackdown" on paid link building.
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