Google Dislike Paid Links
Google enginner Matt Cutts recently made a few posts about paid links in Google’s point of view.
First of all, Hidden links are bad. If you want to sell paid links, Google suggest publishers using link redirection or using rel=nofollow attribute for the paid link.
Matt also advice providing human readable disclosure that a link/review/article is paid, such as “This is a paid review”. In short, make disclosure both readable to human and machine.
Matt Cutts agree 100% with sponsored themes in WordPress are bad.
He also ask people to report paid links to Google. To report paid links, one can sign in Google Webmaster Console or use unauthenticated spam report form with the word “paidlink” in the text area.
Many publishers disagree about the decision to report paid links to Google. Famous SEO Expert, Aaron Wall thought that it is a joke.
[via 10e20]
My two cents
I am not sure how far Google goes about “clearing paid links”. Nobody can stop Google if it wants to do it.
The first question came to my mind is that “Will Text Link Ads doom?“. I am making few hundred bucks every month from Text Link Ads (aff) sales. How many advertisers will stay if the paid links are “nofollow” (earn no PageRank point) ?
Since you are here, read also my Text Link Ads tips :)
If text link ads is doom just join payperpost lor. you’ll need to put disclosure or write something like “this is a paid/sponsor/etc post…
Hi Liew,
Regarding this latest news, it’s still an open case if Google want to throw out paid links. I dunno how they going to stop it because that means alot of links, too many actually, are paid links. No webmaster wants to see their link is a “paid” link, so…
I’ve blogged about this too: http://increseo.com/blog/google-takes-a-step-further-to-identify-paid-links/
It’s a bold but predictable move by Google. Paid links manipulates the search engine results way too much, and it seriously clash with Google’s ‘don’t be evil’ mantra.
And, this move alone would seriously affect the million dollars industry of text links network. We are talking about big name like payperpost, sponsoredreview, blogvertiser, textlinkbroker, textlinkads that depend on the myth of “paid links will improve your search engine ranking” to work. If the words ever get out that paid links are gonna get ‘discounted’, the industry would be in jeorpady.
Those big names those have their ‘damage control’ team, have a lot of reputable SEOs (seomoz, stuntdbl, pronetadvertising..etc) as their ambassador. But I think, soon enough, “paper would not cover up the fire”. I’ve written about this too:
http://increseo.com/blog/can-damage-control-save-text-link-networks/
This is far beyond paid posts. Paid links would affect any sort of direct advertising purchased on a site – which is a bad bad bad anti-competitive move by GOogle. Come on -whatever happened to “Do no evil?”