Google has officially announced that selling links is a linking scheme and outlines what is considered bad for your site and what is considered acceptable when it comes to advertising on your blog. They added “Selling of links” to their help files on link schemes. This means that if you are advertising link spots on your site in order to pass PR on to those that would pay Google will remove your ability to pass PageRank. They have done this recently with the big PageRank scare of ‘07.This also could cause your site to be delisted and force you to hault anything you may be doing (if you can properly guess) that may be against Google’s terms of service. Once this has happened and you have been able to discover what has caused this to happen Google will allow you to apply for reinclusion within the search results through Google’s webmaster tools.

Only you can prevent Google from removing your site from search results

It seems like a big deal and can causes businesses to lose a lot of money over something like this. There is a lot of talk about Google’s “Do no evil” goal and this new circumstance. There are those that believe because Google has their own advertising system (that doesn’t pass link juice of any kind) that they are making it “illegal” for other advertising services to operate and still get Google rankings. This seems a little to conspiratory for me but a lot of people feel like they are getting the shaft from Google because of this.

At any rate there is a lot of drama surrounding Google and paid links. They did however finally come out with some information to help out the blogger that still wants to get revenue from their blogs but have no intention of manipulating the system for a couple of bucks.

What can be done to prevent being banned from Google for paid links?

I hear a lot of people asking this on blogs and forums, there are some things that have been outlined by Google to help you to not get delisted. Google has listed on one of their help pages that you can add a nofollow tag to your paid links to prevent the passing of PageRank or any link juice through them. This has always been the recommendation in the SEO industry for those that want to stay on Google’s good side as far as search engine results go.

The other thing that has been recommended by Google is to have all of your paid outgoing links to filter through a separate URL (see: programming) that isn’t indexed by Google via robots.txt. If you don’t know much about robots.txt I have actually already written an article on ways to use robots.txt for hiding pages from Google and other search engines.

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