When you sell text links ads on your website without placing nofollow attribute on the link, is called selling Paid Links. Doing this instruct Google to pass page rank. The whole story of paid links and SEO is actually a bit complicated and it has both good and bad impact on keyword ranking and SEO. It can increase a website’s page rank when its impact is good and it can cause of losing a page rank when its impact is bad.
5 Reason to don’t make use of Paid Link
- They do not necessarily help you every time.
- You risk a penalty from Google if your paid links are identified.
- You can lose your Google page rank.
- It’s a black-hat SEO technique.
- It can affect your keyword ranking.
If paid links were fine, it would become a money fight instead of a quality fight. A bit like an auction, it would be the deeper pockets that would win. So you would get to really ugly and crappy sites owned by rich dudes.
Google’s Thoughts on Paid Links
Google’s webmaster guidelines cover paid links pretty explicitly, when they say:
Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.
Actually not every type of Paid Links is considered as bad thing. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web world when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:
- Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the anchor <a> tag.
- Redirecting your links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file.
What I say,
It is fine to have paid links on any website as long as it’s not going to enhance the SEO of linking website or boost search engine ranking in any way.
Google Bots have been very smart now; they can easily filter the text links sold for SEO purpose and once such type of links get identified by Google then surly it will down your search engine ranking. Learn how does Google detects paid links.
Google and other search engines allows only text links that are sold for advertising purpose. My best advice when considering paying for links is that the only safe way to acquire paid links is to only pay for links when you’d consider paying for advertising on that site even if you didn’t get any SEO benefit from the link… and even then, be very sure that the site either no follows their links, or that it clearly falls into one of the narrow “okay” zones from Google.
Most people look at links in the wrong light. Look at links through the end uses eyes and not through the search engine eyes. This is where people go down the wrong link path. For example, if you have a widget site and it’s a passion of yours plus it makes you a buck or two, and you find a forum all about widgets where you participate, again because it’s your passion. Links there will help guide others who are interested in widgets to your site, or you write a great blog about cool widgets (again because it’s your passion) links from there will also guide others interested in widgets to your site. And by all means do the blogs on your site; don’t build up other widget sites with your cool widget information.
Paid links (for SEO purpose) are bad for both sides of the deal in a lot of cases! And the most common drawback of selling text links is drop in PageRank and then after drop on search engine ranking.
Final Words About Paid Links
Google doesn’t like paid links and will surly penalize your website for both buying and selling text link for SEO purpose. If you don’t want to get slapped by Google then don’t make use of paid links for SEO purpose and if allowing for advertising purpose either serve it with JavaScript or ad nofollow attribute, always.
