What Kind of Text Links Are Safe?
Yesterday I mentioned how I disabled text link ads on this site… a reader had a question that I thought deserved a proper answer in a separate post instead of as a comment. Here’s what was asked:
do you mean by that company text-link-ads [DOT… you know]?
Or do you mean something else? doesn’t google adsense itself provide text link ads? what about things like for CJ products/advertisers — is that also verboten now?
The text link ads I was referring to are essentially paid links that pass PageRank. Google doesn’t like paid links when those links are used to influence search engine results. Matt Cutts has discussed this for a long time:
What if a site wants to buy links purely for visitor click traffic, to build buzz, or to support another site? In that situation, I would use the rel=”nofollow” attribute. The nofollow tag allows a site to add a link that abstains from being an editorial vote. Using nofollow is a safe way to buy links, because it’s a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine.
Essentially, Google wants you to either use “nofollow” on your paid links or use links that are generated dynamically when the page is loaded via JavaScript. (The latter kind of links don’t pass PageRank because the web crawlers don’t actually “see” them.) AdSense ads are done using the latter, for example.
The key is to avoid services that sell “dofollow” links. Google is penalizing sites that use such links.
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3 Responses to “What Kind of Text Links Are Safe?”
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Hi Eric,
What if those links belong to our own personal advertisers. Would that penalise our site also?
http://www.fadzuli.com
Any paid links without “nofollow” are a possible cause for penalization. The trick is detecting those paid links, of course. Google’s not omniscient. But if it knows that a site is buying links, it’s fairly easy to get a list of sites that link to it and go through those sites for evidence of paid linking.
Eric
How can I do my links as “nofollow” in blogspot?
thanks