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Paid links: do they really affect your Google
rankings?
Many websites on the Internet will link to your website if
you pay them for the links. Is this a good method to increase
the link popularity of your website or can you get in trouble
if you use paid links?
What does Google think about paid links?
Google is very clear about paid links. They don't like them.
Google even has an official form that enables webmasters to
report paid links to Google:
"Google and most other search engines use links to determine
reputation. A site's ranking in Google search results is partly
based on analysis of those sites that link to it.
Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring
a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web
search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality
of links count towards this rating.
However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice
of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding
the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact
it will have on their sites. 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."
A recent problem
A webmaster recently reported problems in Google's webmaster
discussion forum:
"Today I found that my entire site has dropped out of
site in search results. I have a site that received over 2,000
search visits per day and today that has stopped."
It turned out that the website has many affiliate links and
other links to advertisers that looked like paid links to
Google. Unfortunately, these links were not marked as paid
links and Google penalized the website for having the paid
links.
What does this mean for your website?
You should avoid paid links if you don't want to get in trouble
with Google. If you do buy or sell links, make sure that the
links contain the rel="nofollow" attribute. By using
that attribute, you show that the paid link is for advertising
purposes only and that you don't want to manipulate your website
rankings with the link.
While Google doesn't like paid links at all, they also make
clear that links are very important:
"Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring
a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web
search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality
of links count towards this rating."
For that reason, you should try to get as many good links
to your website as possible. The quality is more important
than the quantity.
Links that point to your website are a very important factor
that influences the position of your website in Google's search
results. The links that point to your website should be from
related websites and they should contain the keywords for
which you want to get high rankings.
Do not manipulate the links to your website by buying links
and do not join automated link systems to increase the number
of links to your website. There are many ways to get good
links (related websites, blogs, social bookmark sites, directories,
etc.). IBP helps you to get them all.
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