This would not be considered selling links would it?
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I have a site that is an informational site about a particular market segment. It is not a directory at all, but as part of the site I have pages for the various vendors, and have "states" pages that list which vendors sell in those states.
The site makes very good money on adsense. But I see opportunity in getting the vendors to pay to be listed in our site. At a minimum, grandfather in those already there, and then charge for new companies to be included. Most of the new companies are second-tier players anyway, and if they decode not to pay and get in, it's not to a detriment ot my site. But I do have companies lining up wanting to get in.
Of course my first thought, is what will Google think? I would of course make any link out to one of the vendors NOFOLLOW, so even even though they pay for inclusion on our site, I am not selling links for page juice.
Google loves us in search right now, so they have a favorable opinion of us. The site has lots of content, and new blog posts and comments all most pages hourly.
So, is this going to be okay with Google? I don't see how it breaks any rules, but thought I'd better check.
One further worry: If I change the new guys for inclusion on the site, and don't charge the old ones, that means I'd have the new guys NOFOLLOW, but the old ones would still be DOFOLLOW if I don't change them. I don't want Google to be confused thinking I might have sold those existing DOFOLLOW links as well. So, should I change them all to NOFOLLOW? And if I do, does that then cause anything that Google would not like (I know they don't like pagerank hoarding).
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I believe that all links are seen as 'leakage' but by having a nofollow it shows that you aren't trying to spam or sell links for the sole purpose of link building.
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Hard to give a definite answer here but if you look at some of the most popular sites on the web, the majority of them don't pass link juice.
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Does Google think any less of sites that have nofollow on most all eternal links?
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I think you would be well advised to proceed with caution here, especially if your site is already making "very good money" from adsense. You say your site is not a directory at all, but then say you have State pages that lists vendors and are considering adding a paid option for these vendors... well, without knowing anything more about your site, it sounds a lot like a directory to me. I would set all as nofollow just to cover yourself because the last thing you want is to take a hit from Google and lose all that very good money from adsense!
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Nofollow seems like a good option for you.
While link building I have come across a website that will only dofollow paid links and nofollow unpaid links, when i questioned them (just for my own information) they said it was to give more benefit to the paid links over non-paid but they wanted to keep the non-paid because they offer value to the website visitor.
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That is fine.
You can create nofollow for the vendors just to be safe to show Google it is not to be manipulative but just business.
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