Paid links and Google

November 06, 2007

I'm sure you've been exposed to some of the furore regarding Googles clamp down on paid links. I am one of those that go hit by the page rank reductions which is intended to curb the paid text link market. In the unlikely event you haven't heard the news Google are reducing the PageRank of sites that sell links that do not use the nofollow tag.

Webmaster guidelines

I have Googles guidelines in front of me, specifically the part that talks about paid links. It states that you can sell links for advertising purposes but not links that pass PageRank. If you sell text links you must use the nofollow tag or redirect the link to a page that block search engines.

Whilst I understand the reasoning behind this I am not entirely clear on how they perceive graphical ads. Google does not seem to mind graphical ads which link back to sites. Neither do they seem to be cracking down on paid posts.

I recently visited Carl's site where he is selling text links and has recently decided to mark those links as nofollow. However when he mentions them in this post he links directly to them. The paid reviews and graphical ads on the site also link directly to the advertisiers. It seems to me that webmasters now have the impression only sitewide text links are bad.

Paid text links

Another case in point is TextLinkads and TNX, both sites are text link brokers and buy and sell text links on webmasters behalf. TextLinkads has recently been hit hard by Google yet TNX who blatantly encourage webmaster to try and disguise text links to hide them from Google. The do this by encouraging webmasters to blend the links into their sites.

With this sort of ambiguity in the text link market it will only end in text links going underground and commanding premium rates whilst those following the guidelines will be rewarded with less revenue.

BlogTalks stance

Here at BlogTalks I have decided to follow the guidelines when I eventually decide to sell advertising on this blog. I have been testing BlogAds but feel a custom PHP solution would suit my needs better and be a more flexible solution albeit also more work. As the advertising will provide exposure and traffic for advertisers I need to be able to provide some click tracking for advertisiers.