I was reading a great post on Bruce Clay about paid links last week that tied up really well with a current client that is constantly battling against competitors with glaringly obvious paid link profiles. For those individual SEOs and agencies that have complete ethical and risk free link building strategies its always a challenge but even more so when paid links appear to go unpunished.

There are a few techniques which I see still work very well in manipulating rankings which perhaps avoid automated detection by Google. Hopefully by highlighting them here people will know what to look out for when looking at ways to get ahead of competitors that pay for paid links. These methods are by no means new or groundbreaking but can sometimes get missed when looking for paid links:

Paid links within CSS style banners

This is something that I’ve seen systematically work time and time again for competitors over a multitude of industries (although most common in finance and travel verticals). The process would usually work by providing a piece of code to the site selling a link(s) – this code consists of a CSS style, made up of colour, boarders, widths and fonts, then at the location of the “banner” the <div> calls the CSS class making it look like a normal banner. In reality the text in the visual banner is search engine readable as are any links too. So to many (and seemingly search engines) this goes usually un-noticed.

Drop Down Boxes with Paid Links

I’ve seen this become more popular within the last few months. Works on the same princible as the CSS banners but instead of appearing visually like a banner it looks like a harmless drop down box. Again the coding is unique to the drop down box so doesn’t interfere with any existing site style sheets. The links dont look external and again seem to go unnoticed.

Blogroll Paid Links

A couple of years ago I talked about how and if Google would ever discount blogroll links as so many blogs sell links in these locations. I guess the answer is no (for now), but it’s the easiest location for bloggers to sell links and it’s a genuine area of a blog that would usually contain external links so to Google it probably appears “normal”. This happens most effectively on blogs that link out to relevant websites in their blogrolls - even for manual paid link reviewers there’s no way to distinguish paid and natural links here.

Personally I feel that blogrolls are part of blogging and help people share genuine resources and useful related websites, just on occasions this is used for paid links.

(NB – I do not sell blogroll links on this site, I’m just using an example of a blogroll)

For the past 2 years I’ve created lists of websites that every SEO should either know or use the following year. You can find my previous lists here for 2010 and 2009 but for 2011 please look through the resources below:

1. Google Webmaster Central on YouTube – Google and more importantly Matt Cutt’s help answer questions focused around search which helps clear up a lot hearsay and new developments.
2. Twitter – If you don’t know what Twitter is please venture out of your cave at least once and give it a try. More important know it’s been confirmed social signals contribute to organic search rankings. Very useful for finding business contacts and having SEO news delivered to your screen (depending who you follow obviously).
3. SEO Dojo Training – I’ve been a long term fan of Dave Harry and his blog, SEO Dojo training is a great commnity and I massivly suggest you join in. Lot’s of testing, sharing and training for even the most experienced SEO’s.
4. SEOMoz – Great SEO blog and community for beginers up to experienced SEO’s. Rand Fishkin has done a great job of cementing himself in the industry, new developments and discoveries are often discussed with data to backup theories.
5. Open Site Exporer – Essential link analysis tool for all SEO’s. Find out where your competitors get their links from and discover the value of each link.
6. SEOBook – Essential reading on a regular basis for any SEO and some of the free downloadable tools are great to use.
7. Yammer – Knowledge share will be as important as ever, Yammer lets you create mini communities like Twitter to help share news/links and updates – great for agencies and internal departments that might want to keep persnoal and business life separate!
8. Search Engine Land – A hub of all activity search related, of course you can use Sphinn too which is their sister site which still delivers great SEO articles.
9. Google Insights – If you want to know trends of particular search phrases or websites this is a great place to find free data. Take the results with a pinch of salt but generally Google’s providing good insights here plus if you’re stuck for keyword ideas there’s some relevant suggestions.
10. SEOUnique – An SEO blog written by me that you are reading now (and hopefully you’re enjoying) meant for beginners and those interested in a few SEO theories and tests. 
11. Search Engine Roundtable – Another blog/community website which I’ve been using for years, often very quick to announce new SEO developments so definitly one for the RSS.
12. Majestic SEO – Another link analysis tool and a rather good one too. It’s been around for a while and although sometimes the links aren’t updated frequently enough it has a great admin area and reporting layout.
13. Hitwise – More important for the advanced SEO’s out there, Hitwise provides industry insights at an incredibly granular level. Costs and absolute fortune but they do release bits of free information and data through their blog, well worth bookmarking.
14. LinkedIn - Really important business social site, think of it as a place to map out your career path and past work experiences. A lot of headhunters for agencies and client side jobs in SEO, not only that but you can take part in group discussions and help answer questions which help increase your business profile.
15. Search Engine People – I’ve been a big fan of this blog for many years and can tell you Jeff Quipp is an extremely interesting SEO and blogger. Great search blog posts can be found here!

I’m sure there are many other sites that SEO’s should know for 2011, if you have any suggestions please let me know and I’ll build up a bigger list.