I have a client that contacted me to advertise on my home page. They want to pay me X-dollars per month to place a sentence on my home page with some linked words. It’s obviously going to be a paid link that their hoping to get link juice from.
I’m not an expert in SEO, so was wondering if you anyone could clarify if this is going to harm my ranking to offer paid links like this.
Am I required to use “nofollow” on the link to ensure I’m not penalized, because it’s paid? Am I required to definitely mark this “sentence” as “sponsored content”? If I exclude the “nofollow”, but mark it as “sponsored”, does that mean they will not get the same link relevance that they’re apparently hoping for?
Is this considered unethical if I do this? Or is this a legitimate form of advertising that Google will understand and not penalize me or them?
from my experience, you should consider this as an advertisement rather than a paid link. we’ve had no problems with our ranking going down after we’ve had a paid link posted on our site.
Google don’t want you manipulating their search results by selling link juice so they would rather you put nofollow on such a link. But obviously it’s up to you. The client probably won’t be interested in a nofollowed link if they’re trying to improve their rankings, though. If all they want is traffic they won’t mind.
Adding nofollow to a link simply stops passing PageRank, it doesn’t negate the SEO value of the link. It will still count as a regular backlink and could be quite beneficial to the advertiser.
Definitely treat this as an advertisement and not a paid link. I’m not sure what the advertising best practices are in terms of adding nofollow but you might want to find out and offer that as a solution.
The only downside to you, in terms of SEO, adding a link without nofollow is that you’ll be passing less of your PageRank back to your internal pages. However, the home page generally has links to most internal pages anyway so the amount of link juice passed is probably not much anyway.
I’m pretty sure that in Google’s view, nofollow negates any SEO value of that link (ie. it won’t count as a regular backlink). That’s what I read out of this:
[INDENT]This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web.[/INDENT]
from here.
Having or not having nofollow on a link has no effect on the PR passed to other links on the same page. Google used to split the PR between the links that can be followed but more recently changed to splitting it between all the links and only passing it on to those without nofollow.
according to google: Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is against google guidelines, but:
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 <a> tag
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
and again but, google got a hard time identifying which is paid or not…