That is the predicament I find myself in. One of my competitors who are outranking me on short-tail terms have a bunch of paid advertisements (and followed links) on authoritative sites that I am currently not on. I have a sneaking suspicion these links are a major reason for their success.

Curious, did you pay up to join your competition?

Great. Thanks for the feedback, Erica!

I just realized that the links are actually bitly shortlinks. That wouldn't matter would it?

Any paid link though? The site in question is a very legitimate, authoritative site. Google must know that all these "company profiles" they list must be paid. Why wouldn't Google penalize the site by now?

I have a feeling that when Moz crawls this site, it finds the followed links, and reports them to have link equity. But perhaps when Google crawls the same site it will simply take away the link equity (but not penalize the website or company who has the backlink). At that point, no link juice would be passed, and it would just serve as a referral source. Is that feasible?

My company was recently approached by a website dedicated to delivering information and insights about our industry. They asked us if we wanted to pay for a "company profile" where they would summarize our company, add a followed link to our site, and promote a giveaway for us. This website is very authoritative and definitely provides helpful use to its audience.

How can this website get away with paid submissions like this? Doesn't that go against everything Google preaches? If I were to pay for a profile with them, would I request for a "nofollow" link back to my site?

I will amend what I said. It's never sudden when we get a review, there's plenty of communication between both parties first. It takes a while. These reviews/backlinks always point to inner pages as well, so it's not like one product page has a lot of review backlinks.

Thank you for your help!

That's what I thought. I believe the point of the article above was to more or less scare SEOs away from attempting to get paid links.

We're obviously targeting authoritative sites which do do reviews.

"Engineers not required" is interesting. So Google has real people just combing the web for these types of cases? No algo?

We are currently doing some outreach to bloggers to review our products and provide us with backlinks (preferably followed). The bloggers get to keep the products (usually about $30 worth). According to Google's link schemes, this is a no-no. But my question is, how would Google ever know if the blogger was paid or given freebies for their content?

This is the "best" article I could find related to the subject: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2332787/Matt-Cutts-Shares-4-Ways-Google-Evaluates-Paid-Links

The article tells us what qualifies as a paid link, but it doesn't tell us how Google identifies if links were paid or not. It also says that "loans" or okay, but "gifts" are not. How would Google know the difference? For all Google knows (maybe everything?), the blogger returned the products to us after reviewing them.

Does anyone have any ideas on this? Maybe Google watches over terms like, "this is a sponsored post" or "materials provided by 'x'". Even so, I hope that wouldn't be enough to warrant a penalty.

Your example:

Wood Desks - Home Student Office Desk designs by | Furniture Store

You said that Wood Desk and Wood Desks are the first two keywords. Are you suggesting that because "Wood Desk" is within "Wood Desks", that Google counts both keywords?

That's what I thought. I believe the point of the article above was to more or less scare SEOs away from attempting to get paid links.

My company was recently approached by a website dedicated to delivering information and insights about our industry. They asked us if we wanted to pay for a "company profile" where they would summarize our company, add a followed link to our site, and promote a giveaway for us. This website is very authoritative and definitely provides helpful use to its audience.

How can this website get away with paid submissions like this? Doesn't that go against everything Google preaches? If I were to pay for a profile with them, would I request for a "nofollow" link back to my site?

Any paid link though? The site in question is a very legitimate, authoritative site. Google must know that all these "company profiles" they list must be paid. Why wouldn't Google penalize the site by now?

I have a feeling that when Moz crawls this site, it finds the followed links, and reports them to have link equity. But perhaps when Google crawls the same site it will simply take away the link equity (but not penalize the website or company who has the backlink). At that point, no link juice would be passed, and it would just serve as a referral source. Is that feasible?