Paid links or no paid links
Oct 9th, 2007 | By knup | Category: Link DevelopmentThere has been a lot of talk lately around the blogosphere about how “paid links” may hurt your ranking with Google. 
This shocks me but it seems to be true as some of the top sites in the industry got penalized for having paid links on their site. This bugs me because I just started using paid links as a source of income on several of the sites in my network. Honestly, I’m not too concerned about it as my Pageranks aren’t that high in the first place. Moving me from a 3 to a 2 can’t be too bad 
So I will continue to use paid links as a source of income for some of my sites. I very well may drop text-link-ads and only use private links/ads from now on, but might just keep everything as is.
A huge tip that I would suggest if you do continue using paid links would be. 1) Don’t put your paid links under a “Our Sponsors” or “Partner Links” section. I do this currently but the more I thought about it the more I don’t like it. This is telling Google that these are paid links. Try to incorporate your “paid links” into your blog without making it so obvious.
So how about you? Do you plan on removing paid links from your arsenal? Or are you sticking with them?
I was just thinking of adding them. Thanks for the tip, i will have to consider how best to integrate them now
I have them on a few sites but just under the external links or links section. I wouldn’t necessarily say that heading them up as ‘Partner Links’ can automatically mean they’re paid links. I have Partner links and link to my other relevant sites on one site (doesn’t sell any TLA on there).
I don’t see how Google can expect to determine who is selling and who isn’t unless it’s plainly obvious on a site. To be honest I think if they do target sites that they can’t be sure of then a lot of innocent sites are going to be hit.
Steve - let me know if you have any questions or need anything.
Sarah - good points. I could see innocent sites getting dinged by Google if they start trying to enforce this. My hunch says they can’t keep up with it and it might not be worth their time.
I’ll be sticking with some paid links. I build sites for people not search engines and if I can sell a link that I think will benefit my readers/users I will do it. Google Adsense often displays ads that does not benefit my readers/users. Google and their mystical link juice is there problem not mine.