Over the past few days, there has been a lot of buzz in the community has been buzzing about an article on The
Outline named How brands secretly buy their way into Forbes, Fast Company, and HuffPost stories. The article in question also claims that major publications on the web, including New York Times, CNN, and TechCrunch, have accepted payments from companies in exchange for positive coverage.
Bribing journalists for links is becoming so common that it’s now the new norm, which makes it challenging for publications to weed out such links despite their best efforts. Google has told in the past that these links are known to them and they ignore most of those links so they don’t impact their algorithms.
The article in Outline actually disclosed the prices and a list of 50 or so sites that engage in this activity.
Here is the list of 50 sites that have been revealed as having this issue. This is shocking indeed.
Google has responded, via Danny Sullivan who has reminding everyone that attempting to manipulate search rankings with paid links is against the search giant’s guidelines.
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