Paid text links
Not been around much recently - apologies. New (hectic) job plus a rare holiday taking most of my time just now.
Text links - I've recently received three or four offers for paid links on a couple of our popular sites; $15 - $20 per month so not huge amounts but worth having. Other than a request to link to an SEO site, the target sites are not at all relevant to ours. I'm interested in your opinions as to whether this could be detrimental to the ranking of the parent sites given recent speculation that G has new algorythms that can "spot" paid links (how I'm not sure!)
One of our sites that hosts a couple of Linkworth outbound links has dropped PR slightly since the link placement but I'm figuring that this may be coincidental?
Thoughts welcomed…
Dave
Comment by TextAdSearch — August 7, 2007 @ 6:06 am
According to Matt Cutts and Google selling/buying links is bad. Links of a different theme are worse.
Whether or not they punish you and to what extent is anyone's guess.
In my opinion I would say they probably devalue your PR if they think you are selling ads for PR purposes.
Comment by SarahG — August 7, 2007 @ 9:24 am
My guess is they spot them by either looking for irrelevant links on the page or, more easily, by looking for a list with all the inline styles (in the case of TLA). I tend to delete this however from the file TLA give so it displays in the markup as a plain old unordered list. Once you've removed any obvious markings on the code then how can they tell (as were your words). If they penalise a couple of sites because one links to the other and they've got it wrong, does that really make them look good? I wouldn't think so. But then again, this is Google!
Comment by Oli — August 7, 2007 @ 4:00 pm
Just remember, even if Google can't automatically detect the paid links, someone could still report you. This is likely to have more of an effect on the link buyer, though.
If you're worried about it, you could maybe allow them to purchase a link inside an actual article
Might look a little less like a paid link then.
Comment by Gary — August 7, 2007 @ 4:04 pm
It's _impossible_ to spot paid links. Unless the site owner wants them spotted - "thank you to my sponsors" type of posts - or the site owner marks them as "sponsors" or somesuch.
It's completely up to the site owner who he/she links to, google can go and anally invade themselves
The questions to you is; Who determines relevance? And should relevance really matter?
Comment by Will — August 7, 2007 @ 5:50 pm
Pfff, I think it's just the usual scaremongering. I could replace my paid links with non-paid links and no one would be able to tell the difference.
The only way anyone is going to know that a website is potentially selling links is if they appear in one of the marketplaces and even then how is anyone going to prove, without a doubt, that any particular link on that site is paid for?
There are plenty of reasons to have links in clusters or in unordered lists. Someone paying for them is only one possible reason!