Welcome to Google MythBuster Series, its been a long time I’ve written any post in this series. That is because of my busy schedule.I’ll try to cover up all the articles in a week or two. Now, coming to the topic, today I am going to tell you does selling text links on your blog has any effect on Google search rankings or not. Lets start:
Paid links on your blog that passes PageRank can decrease your site’s ranking in search results
- Yes, you read it right, as confirmed by Google official blog, selling links on your blog that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.
- Google will not inform you about the paid links but will decrease the rankings of every article of yours in search results.
- Do-follow paid links decreases your site value
What is meant by “paid links that passes PageRank”
It means that you are allowed to sell links on your blog but it must be no-follow. If the link is do-follow, it will surely affect your site’s rankings.
Why Google hates do-follow paid links
Google says that, do-follow paid links can hurt the relevance by causing:
- Inaccuracies : False popularity and links that are not fundamentally based on merit, relevance, or authority
- Inequities : Unfair advantage in our organic search results to websites with the biggest pocketbooks
Do follow paid links increases their site’s page rank and Google users get non quality and non relevant articles on top. This is the reason Google hates do-follow paid links.
Things you must do while placing paid links on your blog
If you are willing to place any paid link on your blog make sure you follow any of the two tips below :
- You must add rel=”nofollow” attribute to <a> tag or
- You can redirect the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
How to report paid links
- If you see any link that you think is paid and is also do-follow, so you can report do-follow paid links here.
- You can read on how to report paid links here.
Read more about paid link
- Paid links on Google Google Webmaster Central
- Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank on official Google blog.
I hope you like this article, if yes then do not forget to subscribe to this blog using the four links below. Thanks for reading !
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the detailed post Gagan
You’re welcome Simran.
One thing that is confusing me is, How does Google find weather a link is paid link or a normal one? Can u answer this? I am not talking about sponsored review sites..
Hi Rohit,
Google officials can answer this question very well, I do not know about the algorithm they use to find the paid links. I’ll ask this question in Google Webmaster forum and will update this article later. Please subscribe to the comments for the update.
well thank for informing about this topic. i sell some space with dofollow tags. now, changed it to nofollow.
@Gagan: I had subscribed to comments, but I am not getting any updates..I donno why..there may be some error.. I will subscribe once again!
I didn’t know about it before. However I have two dofollow link in my sidebar which are not paid just a normal link. Will it affect my pagerank?
Hi Nasif,
If they are not paid links then you do not have to worry at all, it wont affect your page rank and site rankings !!
I did it before but, used nofollow
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