Google and the Paid Link Dilemma

If you are undergoing an SEO campaign for your website you may be considering getting paid links. The aim of this article is to look at paid links from a Google perspective and what they will do got your SEO campaign.

The first thing to say is that link building is an important part of all SEO campaigns and without adequate quality links you have very little chance to get to the top of the search engine. The key to this is the fact that quality links is very important.

What are Paid Links?

Basically paid links are exactly what they seem to be. This is where a webmaster will pay another website to link to their site for the purpose of passing on PageRank and giving link quality.

However there are some type of paid links that will not come into this category and they are those obtained through directories where your website is there for advertising purposes. For example if you were to have your business listed in yell and this includes a link to your website then you effectively have a paid link. However the difference here is that you have not put your website on yell to obtain a link for ranking purposes but in order to advertise your business through yell.

What Google does with Paid Links

Google uses its algorithms to detect paid links and will then discount them from their ranking process. It will generally try to find those links that have been paid for only to get up the search engine rankings. They will not as such ban you but they will discount these links which means if you only have paid links then this will significantly impact your rankings.

Google also advises sites that sell links for advertising purposes to include a nofollow tag on the links to stop the search engines from following the links. This will prevent the link from appearing as though it is a paid link. However you will not be able to control what directories to with their links.

What you Should Do

We would always recommend getting links from ethical means and that paying for links will have no benefit for your website in the long run. Spend time getting links in an ethical more natural way then it might take longer to get to the top but once you are there you will stay there.

Beware of SEO companies that say they will get you to the top of the search engines in a very quick time. This could mean they will be acquiring paid links for your website and you may be at the top initially but when Google detects your paid links you will rapidly drop. Make sure you ask any agency how they will be acquiring links and the practises they engage in. If they talk about buying links, get out of there as quickly as possible.

How to Improve Search

Google asks that if you find out about a site getting paid links that you report them. This will enable Google to improve their algorithm and ensure that they return the highest quality most relevant results at every search. Then if you get to the top of those results it will probably be because you have a high quality, popular site that will add real benefit to visitors.

Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com

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