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Paid
links
are paid for
links that
can
manipulate
PageRank
or be
used
for
advertising.
On the one hand,
paid links are
advertisements for your business that are
highly targeted to a specific audience. On the
other
hand,
paid
links are
considered a
black hat SEO technique, especially by
Google. If a
paid
link
manipulates
PageRank, it is
viewed as a form
of
link
farming and your
website will be
penalised.
The
following
information is
paraphrased
from
Google’s
Webmaster
Tools
Help page:
Google, like most search engines,
use
links to
determine a
website’s relevance and
authority. A website’s
ranking on Google search results
is
based on
many
factors, including the
quality of
websites that
link to it.
Link based
rating has
greatly improved Google’s
ability to
return
relevant results in a
search.
However,
some
Search Engine
Optimisers and
webmasters engage in buying
and
selling
links that pass
PageRank. Doing this is in
violation of Google’s
Webmaster
Guidelines. While not
all
paid
links
violate these
guidelines, links that
are
bought
and sold for
advertising purposes should be
marked with a
rel=“nofollow” tag.
The nofollow tag
indicates that the link
should not influence the ranking
in the search engine's index.
Google
acknowledges that buying
and
selling links is part of the
internet
economy and
accepts that this is done
for
advertising. Google has
sophisticated
algorithms that can
detect
link farming websites.
Link
farming
is the
process where a
large
website buys low quality
and spam-filled
links and then
sells them to other webmasters
to use on their websites. This is
frowned
on by large search engines and
will
be severely
punished. A
good example of this is
the penalisation of leading American
department store
JC Penny by Google.
JC Penny had been found
guilty of using over 2 000
paid links to increase
PageRank. In order to
penalise them, Google moved them
down to the 5th page
of search results. This is
just one example of how a website
can be penalised by search engines.
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