The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam

Could it be that Scorecounter is paying for their links to be embedded, as opposed to them being the owner/developer of both sites? If so, and provable, can they be flagged in some way?

Doesn't say much for Google's ability to determine relevancy in linking or recognizing suspicious link growth. Or perhaps it just takes some time ...

If I’m not mistaken, paying for links is still very much against Google’s policies. Whatever weight that should carry... in my opinion you should always try to be as independent from Google as possible. It’s such a huge liability.

Clearly. But I guess it is not outright proven that they are technically buying links. Though they would likely fall under some form of bad behavior in Google's eyes.

And, buying or otherwise, I am not sure what the mechanism is for bringing this to Googles attention.

I doubt there is another acquisition channel for a project like this that would compare to SEO (and not just Google).

Probably. It'd be weird for a SEO spammer to put the effort into building a popular HTML editor/optimizer just to inject links to a few sites they own and operate. It's far more likely that they're offering that link injection as a service.

> as opposed to them being the owner/developer of both sites?

If they're not owned by the same entity, then this blog post is rather odd: https://html-online.com/articles/scoreboard/

(To be fair, that entire blog seems odd...)

Agreed. Sure seems that way. Though that may actually make it less likely to be a violation than if one was paying the other for the links. Not within the spirit of the terms, but may not be a violation either.

Google used to impose manual penalties for unnatural links BUT this gave the rise to, you guessed it, competitors buying unnatural links for their enemy and waiting for the penalty to be given.

Nowadays, unnatural links are mostly ignored.

> paying for links is still very much against Google’s policies.

quite a strange think to say about a company whose bussiness is based on selling links (to ads)

I believe dstick meant to say "paying [someone else] for links is still very much against Google’s policies."