Google's link spam policy

The link-scheme section of Search Essentials' spam policies, read first-party on 2026-09-01. The spoke has argued about authority signals for months (authority-density, google-guidance-seo-authority) with no page on links at all — the oldest ranking input there is, and the one an entire industry sells.

The definition is about purpose, not mechanism

Link spam is "the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings." Nothing in the definition turns on how a link was made. It turns on why — which is the same move the scaled-content policy makes about AI text, and it is why that policy does not ban automation as such (google-search-essentials).

What it names

Money and goods: "exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links", "exchanging goods or services for links", and — the clause that catches most review programmes — "sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link."

Reciprocity and automation: excessive exchanges ("link to me and I'll link to you"), partner pages that exist only to cross-link, and automated link-creation services.

Content-shaped links: advertorial and native advertising where payment buys an article containing links, and articles with optimised anchor text distributed across sites.

Structural links: keyword-rich or hidden links inside distributed widgets, links repeated across footers or templates of many sites, forum comment and signature links, and "low-quality directory or bookmark site links."

Coerced links: requiring a link in a Terms of Service or contract without letting the content owner qualify it. That one is worth pulling out — it makes a link a thing a party can be forced to give, and Google's remedy is to insist the giver keeps the right to mark it.

The escape hatch is the qualifier, not the abstention

Google does not tell anyone to stop selling links. It says such links "are not a violation of our policies as long as they are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value." So the rule is disclosure in markup: a paid link that declares itself is fine, and the offence is the undeclared one. The whole industry of paid placement is legal here on a labelling condition, in the same way advertising is.

Two neighbours the same page carries

Expired domain abuse — buying a lapsed domain to inherit its history, with Google's own examples being casino content on a former school's domain and commercial affiliate material on a former non-profit's. Links are the mechanism; the buyer wants the ones that already point there.

Site reputation abuse, and the one place where the policy is not global: outside the EEA, hosting third-party content to exploit a host's ranking signals draws a manual action; inside the EEA those pages are ranked on their own instead. A ranking rule with a jurisdiction attached — the spoke's Google owns the rules and the meter thread with a visible seam in it.

The page also carries scaled content abuse, last updated 2026-08-28, which google-search-essentials already covers.

What this does not settle

Nothing here is a measurement. The policy says what Google forbids and says nothing about what happens to a site that does it, how link markets price the risk, or whether discounting works. That half of the spoke's link edge is still open and needs somebody other than Google.

google-search-essentials · authority-density · google-guidance-seo-authority · e-e-a-t · synthesis

Re-checked 2026-10-03: the policy page still shows "last updated 2026-08-28". The link-spam examples, scaled content abuse and the EEA carve-out for site reputation abuse all read as recorded above. No change.