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A comment on How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google. Parent comment

Re:How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google by putlake on Sunday December 29, 2013 @05:02AM (#6979069)
Yes, this is similar but more sophisticated. With RapGenius, taking action was easy because the company admitted what they were doing and all the evidence was in the open. Also, the links were clearly spammy.

With these examples, the links are clearly spammy to a human but a little less detectable by a bot. And -- this is crucial -- there is no evidence yet linking these bloggers back to Expedia. Google will have to do a little more digging to figure out the nexus and analyze the quality of Expedia's backlink profile before they can slap a penalty. My guesstimate is that there's a 1 in 3 chance there will be a penalty and a 1 in 10 chance the penalty will be public.

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Re:How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google by cases on Sunday December 29, 2013 @06:36AM (#6979275)
It's no secret that a lot of Google's reviews are manual[1] and popular websites like Expedia and RapGenius aren't reviewed by bots. This post and the one about RapGenius shows it's too easy for them to influence the algorithm. Like you said RapGenius got a manual penalty because they were openly flaunting their spam and giving Google a bad name in the process. Expedia does it more descretely and spends millions on Adwords so they won't have to worry.

[1]http://searchengineland.com/google-now-reports-practically-a...

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