Google's stance on paid links
Google's made a sly little update to their webmaster guidelines late last week. While the latest guidelines did include mention of the ‘nofollow tag’ ‘ it, also does a pretty good job of explaining exactly what Google expects from site owners who buy or sell links.
While Google has long stated site owners should Not Buy text links, the new edits make it clear they also disapprove of Selling text links.
Here are the new guidelines as laid out by Google
Some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.
Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:
* Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the tag
Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank.
It is pleasing to see Google has finally taken the time to make their stance clear on their web site. However, it is frustrating to see that Google is now actively penalizing sites for not doing something. In the past, most of Google's penalties were targeted at sites who were actively trying to dupe the search engines by using things like hidden text or cloaking.
With their new stance on paid links, many site owners who buy and sell advertising without giving a thought to the impact it could have on their search rankings are now at risk. So for all of you white hat SEOs who buy and sell paid links with the goal of trying to improve a sites visibility in the organic search results, you are now officially a black hat!