A link scheme is any attempt to manipulate search rankings by creating, buying or arranging links rather than earning them. The term comes from Google’s spam policies, which list the practices Google considers link spam and may ignore or act against.
How a link scheme works
Google’s policy focuses on intent: links created mainly to influence rankings rather than to help readers. The practices it names include:
- Buying or selling links that pass ranking credit, whether for money, goods, services or free products sent in exchange for a followed link.
- Excessive link exchanges, or partner pages set up purely to swap links.
- Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text.
- Automated programs or services that create links to your site.
- Requiring a followed link as a condition of a contract or terms of service, without letting the other site nofollow it.
- Keyword-rich links hidden in widgets, templates or footers distributed across many sites.
- Low-quality directory or bookmark links, and optimised links in forum posts, comments and signatures.
Paid placements themselves are allowed. Sponsorships, adverts and affiliate links are fine when marked with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", which tells Google not to count them as editorial votes.
The grey areas usually involve value changing hands quietly. A discount offered in return for a link, a free service given to a blogger who then links back, or a “partnership” in which two firms agree to link to each other’s service pages all count as exchanges of value if the link passes ranking credit. The test I use is simple: would the link exist if neither side cared about search rankings?
Why it matters
Google deals with link schemes in two ways. Most of the time its automated systems simply discount links they identify as unnatural, so the business that paid for them gets nothing. Where the manipulation is clear, a reviewer can apply a manual action for unnatural links, which appears in Search Console and can hold back affected pages, or the whole site, until it is cleaned up.
UK businesses have a second reason to care. Undisclosed paid content, such as a sponsored blog post presented as independent opinion, also raises disclosure questions under the CAP Code, which requires marketing to be obviously identifiable as marketing, and under consumer protection law. Marking links correctly and labelling sponsored content clearly keeps you on the right side of both Google and the Advertising Standards Authority.
Common mistakes
- Sending free products to bloggers and asking for a followed link in the review.
- Buying “guest posts” on sites that publish any paid article, usually without disclosure.
- Web designers adding keyword footer credits, such as “web design Manchester”, across every client site.
- Keeping a links page full of reciprocal links with dozens of unrelated businesses.
- Assuming a practice is safe because an agency calls it “outreach” or “blogger relations”.
How to act on it
Start by auditing what you have. If you have bought links, or used an agency that did, list them and check whether each is marked sponsored or nofollow. Where you can, ask the site owner to add the attribute or remove the link. If there is a manual action, document the clean-up, list the links you could not remove in a disavow file, and submit a reconsideration request explaining what happened and what you have changed.
Then change how links arrive. Treat every sponsorship, gifted product and partnership as marketing first, and mark any resulting link as sponsored. Earn editorial links by producing material people want to cite. That is the approach my link building service takes, and it includes working through problems left behind by past link schemes.