SEO Crunch

Paid Links and nofollow

The nofollow HTML attribute tells search engines that a hyperlink shouldn’t affect the ranking of the URL being linked to. This is supposed to reduce the value of search engine spam and enhance search results relevance.

Recently, Google has cracked down hard on the practice of paid links, reducing the PageRank of sites found or believed to be selling links. Exactly how the algorithm determines what is paid or not paid is one of the most popular topics on Webmaster and SEO forums these days. Most of what is written is completely erroneous and sometimes plain ridiculous.

On his blog, Google’s infamous Matt Cutts has provided some examples of blatant cases of paid linking. Reading most of what he says, we can infer that sites become easy targets if they have a heading or text that reads Sponsor Links, Advertisers, or something similar, which is then followed by a list of links that do not use nofollow.

This is even more obvious when the link targets have absolutely nothing in common with the content on the linking site! Footer links are another suspicious target. So, we think there are just a few simple rules to follow if you do sell links on your Web site … and who doesn’t unless they really don’t care about making money from their investment?

1. Don’t put up a long list of links to sites that are unrelated to yours. If you do so, use nofollow as Google instructs.
2. Don’t blatantly advertise on your site that you accept paid links. You might put a drop down item in your contact form for “Advertising” for instance, instead of putting “Advertise Here” on your home page!
3. Probably not wise to put the same external link on every page (commonly known as a site wide link). Again, if you do so, use nofollow, but good luck finding advertisers willing to pay for it!
4. Do embed external links within your body text and try to make them completely relevant to your content … which is how links naturally appear in most cases anyway. I defy even the brain-bigger-than-a-planet engineers at Google to develop an algorithm that could determine if this type of link is paid or not!
5. Do link only to quality sites, regardless how much spammers may be willing to offer you. Linking to MFA (made for adsense) sites, link farms, etc. adds no value to your users or search engine indexes and will only lead to your site also joining those lowly ranks.