Paid Links - How does Google classify them?
-
Greetings All,
I have a question regarding "Paid Links."
My company creates custom websites for other small businesses across the country. We always have backlinks to our primary website from our "Dealer Sites." Would Google and other search engines consider links from our "dealer sites" to be "paid links?"
Example:
http://www.atlanticautoinc.com/ is the "dealer site."Would Google consider the links from Atlantic Auto to be a "paid link," and therefor have less of an impact for page rankings, due to it not being organic?
Any insight on this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!!!
-
Google penalizes when it sees that you are gaming seo or trying to fool google.
If you use "no follow" on your links, you are saying google that dont count the link juice therefore you are not claiming seo benefit from these links. NO harm done.
Google doesn't penalizes you for any no. of "no follow" because you are not fooling it. You have added it for your users, not for google. Many sites like "Pay pal" have their links below any site which uses its payment system, but as it has "no follow", google doesn't penalize them if also they have millions of such link backs.
relax and add "no follow" on these type of links. you will get benefit. for sure.
Hope this helps
-
Hi there,
Whilst I don't think you'd likely be penalised for this, we generally don't advise linking like this from footers due to how often footer linking was used as a spam technique in the past. The paid links Google is more concerned about are the links where hundreds of dollars are exchanged between unrelated parties for one party to post what looks like an editorial link to the other, with no disclosure that the link is basically an advertisement meant for the purpose of influencing search results.
A purist would likely say you should nofollow these links in order to remove any risk, so that is a good option if you are concerned. I don't believe you'd be likely to fall into a severe penalty or anything similar with these, but I would consider nofollowing based on these links being classic footer links.
-
Thank you very much for the response!
Do you believe that Google is able to distinguish them as "Paid Links" due to the similar IP addresses?
If we're talking ten thousdand to twenty thousand links of this nature, is it true that having -THAT- many "nofollows" can also hurt us? I read that Google looks at an over-abundance of "nofollow" links as a bad thing, as well...
Thank you for your input!
-
Yes, Google may think those as paid links and may penalize. Best think to do. Use "no follow" on those back links you are getting. It will solve the problem. you will still get visitors from those links but no link juice thus no chance of paid link penalty.
-
Here's a really recent video of Matt Cutts explaining what's considered paid links.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does "google selected canonical" pass link juice the same as "user selected canonical"?
We are in a bit of a tricky situation since a key top-level page with lots of external links has been selected as a duplicate by Google. We do not have any canonical tag in place. Now this is fine if Google passes the link juice towards the page they have selected as canonical (an identical top-level page)- does anyone know the answer to this question? Due to various reasons, we can't put a canonical tag ourselves at this moment in time. So my question is, does a Google selected canonical work the same way and pass link juice as a user selected canonical? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Lewald10 -
Google Ecommerce Alerts
I recently started getting email notifications from Google re: new products on our websites. I am subscribed to Google alerts. Can anyone shed some light on this?
Technical SEO | | AMHC0 -
"Links to your site" in google webmaster tools not showing any data
Hello All I have a very strange query regarding the "Links to your site" section in webmaster's account my account does not show the Link data after so many days (more then 30 days) of verification. Can you please help me out how can I get my data in the webmaster's account?
Technical SEO | | barnesdorf
Please note I have verified the account using Google Analytic verification process. (does this affect?) I have seen this issue in my two websites which I have verified by Google Analytics. Please help me out.0 -
Google Dancing?
Hello, I was wondering why my website for some keywords goes from 2nd 3rd page in Google to 7th or even more sometimes? This happens since a while. Any suggestion? Thanks. Eugenio
Technical SEO | | socialengaged0 -
Does Google Still Pass Anchor Text for Multiple Links to the Same Page When Using a Hashtag? What About Indexation?
Both of these seem a little counter-intuitive to me so I want to make sure I'm on the same page. I'm wondering if I need to add "#s to my internal links when the page I'm linking to is already: a.) in the site's navigation b.) in the sidebar More specifically, in your experience...do the search engines only give credit to (or mostly give credit to) the anchor text used in the navigation and ignore the anchor text used in the body of the article? I've found (in here) a couple of folks mentioning that content after a hashtagged link isn't indexed. Just so I understand this... a.) if I were use a hashtag at the end of a link as the first link in the body of a page, this means that the rest of the article won't be indexed? b.) if I use a table of contents at the top of a page and link to places within the document, then only the areas of the page up to the table of contents will be indexed/crawled? Thanks ahead of time! I really appreciate the help.
Technical SEO | | Spencer_LuminInteractive0 -
Tags showing up in Google
Yesterday a user pointed out to me that Tags were being indexed in Google search results and that was not a good idea. I went into my Yoast settings and checked the "nofollow, index" in my Taxanomies, but when checking the source code for no follow, I found nothing. So instead, I went into the robot.txt and disallowed /tag/ Is that ok? or is that a bad idea? The site is The Tech Block for anyone interested in looking.
Technical SEO | | ttb0 -
Canonical Link Quesiton
I wrote an article that is a page article, but would also be a very good blog post - So my question is two things: 1. If i post it as a static page and syndicate it as a blog post and have it as a canonical link to the page, google will read see the blog and read the page _url as the one with credit correct? In turn not dinging me for duplicate content. 2. Given if the above statement is correct, should I write the blog and put it on my static page referencing the blog or the way i have it as a static page with the blog using a canonical reference back to the page. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | tgr0ss0 -
Google Shopping Australia/Google Merchant Centre
So Google Shopping has finally landed in Australia so we've got some work todo hooking it up to our client ecom sites. Right now we have a handful of clients who are setup, the feed is getting in their ok but all products are sitting in "disapproved" status in the dashboard and clicking into each individual product the status says awaiting review. I logged a support ticket with Google to get some more info on this as it doesn't look right to me (ie the disapproved status in dashboard) and got a useless templated answer. Seems that if I switch the country destination to US the products are approved and live in google.com shopping search within the hour. Switch back to Australia and they go back to disapproved status. Anyone having the same issue/seen this before? I simply don't trust Google support and wondering if there's other factors at play here.
Technical SEO | | Brendo0