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Add nofollow to prevent being banned for paid links
Posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 under SEO by Dustin Brewer.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.
Whats Next?
8 Responses to “Add nofollow to prevent being banned for paid links”
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About Dustin Brewer
Dustin Brewer is a freelance web designer based out of Oklahoma City, OK passionate about web standards, and beautiful web design. Dustin Brewer has been in the web design industry for over 8 years through freelance and professional experience. If you are interested in hiring Dustin Brewer please visit the web design services page to find out more information. You can also checkout the web design portfolio.
Dustin this is great… I have now the idea putting ads on my website. this is great two thumbs up for you Dustin..
Thanks
I was beginning to feel like it was a no-win situation with Google. Great article Dustin, and very helpful. Thanks very much.
Awesome information, I had been wondering what I was supposed to do to keep advertising on my site. Google doesn’t exactly make all of this information as public as I would like.
It isn’t so much about the comment links that you have to worry about it is more about having paid links without nofollow on your site.
You shouldn’t get penalized for your comment links but you could be put into a possible “bad neighborhood” category that some of the sites you link out to may be in.
As a point, I try to make the only external links coming from here going to sites that I pick specifically.
[...] behind Google’s rank slashing, Dustin Brewer has posted a very insightful article on adding nofollow tags to prevent you from being banned for paid links. This post is in my opinion, a must read if you are trying to come back from having your PageRank [...]
I think the interesting part, google makes this job unknown so we dont know exactly what is happening.. if google is counting or not.. is nofollow links work for someting or not.. so there is always a hope
rel=â€nofollow†does not stop Google crawling the page! And Google does crawl the page.
It may not index it if the link to that page is only with nofollow, but for sure will index it if some where else there is a link to the same page without nofollow.
It does not stop Google from indexing the title of the anchor link even though Matt C. told us it has been fixed…
Maybe the fix takes time to take hold, please check for the changes if they have happened.
As far as PR juice is been passed that is the question for Google algorithm.
So, is it worth to post comments even if you do not get PR for the condom link? The answer is definitely yes.
1. The link will be indexed one way or another when the comments are picked up by RSS aggregators which mostly do not use condoms.
2. You will get human traffic, which in my opinion is more relevant than what Googlebot send you.
3. The titel of the link is very important to promote your brand name.
In conclusion all hoopla aside, following Google Quality Guidelines, make pages for humans not for bots – forget about the freaking PR…
Follow – nofollow – who cares, it is a waste of time even to think about it.
If someone comments on my forum and I accept the comments I pass the link juice if not then they are history…plain and simple…
Matt C. we do not need condoms…....
I think not all the out bound links treated as bad by google. If you have relevent outbound links you may even gain better ranks. But if the outbound links are mainly for advertisement or gives no real value to the reader it may reated as bad. Also it depends on the quantity of the outbound links if you have few payed links on page it should be ok. But the question is how many is too much?