Paying for Links-Google Style

This is a short excursion from my posts on Affiliate Marketing, but relevant when you want to make money from your site. It’s called paying for links-and if you have been reading in the forums or hitting some of the blogs, you will know that paying for links and Google’s stance on this issue is in, let’s say, turmoil.

If you’re thinking about paying for some links for rank on your web page or pages, then you may want to be aware of what is in the news.

Paying for links

By Vickie J Scanlon

According to Cutts, Google have no objection to having the paid links, if they are identified-citing the FCC ruling that states that sponsored or advertisements must be clearly labeled. And per Google, one additional factor- it does not pass on page rank. If it does pass on page rank – you could be penalized, or worse yet, you may find many of your pages not being indexed.

So how do you go about doing this? Google suggests some of the following remedies.

1. Redirect through URL that is blocked by your robots.txt file
2. Use a redirect through URL using 302
3. Apply rel="nofollow" attribute to the link (WebProNews)
   

It is probably wise to take notice, because according to this report from Sphinn, Google has been taking notice of the paid links and some have suggested that Google have manually penalized certain sites (delisting their website pages) vs. algorithmically doing so.( WebProNews Article-Is Google Hitting Directory Links).

Many advertisers may, and have bulked at some of these suggestions, indicating that it is stealing/cheating/unfair. However, I guess each Webmaster must decide for themselves - To be indexed, or not to be indexed.

The next question may be- how do you handle a request for a paid link to your site from an outside source? Same rules apply.