If your site has been buried under a heap of results, there may be a good reason for it. Google, which partially bases its search results on inbound links, has made life difficult for some marketers by declaring war on paid link sites.

While Google has always banned paid links, the search giant now seems serious about enforcing the rules.

Rand Fishkin, who compiled a list of 70 sites that have drawn Google's ire, told Forbes the crackdown on link directories has begun in earnest.

"We do consider buying links to be outside of our guidelines, and be notified that we may take stronger action on that in the future," said Google senior engineer Matt Cutts. "If you're a webmaster, you can do whatever you want on your site. But as a search engine, we can do what we think is best to return a high quality index."

But one concern over the crackdown is that Google may go too far, blocking out blogs and other sites that sell links to marketers.

"This is a shot across the bow from Google," Fishkin said. "They're seeing a heavy amount of manipulating, and they want to show what it looks like when they take punitive action. It's intended more as public relations than anything else."

Source: iMedia Connection