Yes, someone on the Internet has really created a “paid links” detector! You can find the site here. It’s free currently because it is beta. Ironically, it is created by a company selling paid links themselves and their slogan is “BUY links that work”. Anyway, it is supposed to be able to detect paid links by checking the behaviour of the links. I believe that try to check the behaviour of paid links from Digitalpoint Forums and TextLinkAds. The actual way they do it, I am not very sure. Most likely, it checks the words around it by whether it has the words “sponsored” or “supported” near the links and whether they are site-wide.

Before we go any further, I think we should check out this detector first. So I tested out this detector with my blog’s mainpage and they found one paid link. And it’s the link to Authority Sites Directory, which is not a paid link. More like it’s just a link to my own site. So I go and test Authority Sites Directory and they found 2 paid links. These are links to my blog and to my friends website. These are also not paid links. I tried my High PageRank Sites Directory frontpage but no paid links were detected. This is kind of weird because I expected them to detect my outgoing site-wide link at the footer. The last I tried was my local business directory frontpage and lo and behold, no paid links were detected. It really looks like the detector is highly unreliable and very inaccurate. Since they don’t actually tell us how the detector works and what kind of behaviour they check, sadly, this tool shouldn’t be used by any serious webmasters.

I really hope that they improve on this detector. It can help webmasters who are rushed or don’t have the time to check a site properly. But I don’t think there is any real way to find out whether a link is paid or not, because most of these “transactions” are not displayed openly. If you check out blogs, you will be able to see textlink advertisements but are they really paid advertisements or are those actual reviews or just honest opinions? There is just no way to prove it. And I am pretty sure that Google won’t be that dumb to penalized a website because the links look like paid links. Some are pretty obvious, but most are not. Just because that Matt guy says it is, don’t mean it really is.

And the motive of creating this tool is highly suspicious. Especially if you see what that site is all about. I am naturally not a suspicious person, but this really stinks a lot.