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
-
Internal Linking issue
So i am working with a review company and I am having a hard time with something. We have created a category which lists and categorizes every one of our properties. For example a specific property in the category "restaurant" would be as seen below: /restaurant/mcdonalds /restaurant/panda-express And so on and so on. What I am noticing however is that our more obscure properties are not being linked to by any page. If I were to visit the page myurl.com/restaurant I would see 100+ pages of properties, however it seems like only the properties on the first few pages are being counted as having links. So far the only way I have been able to work around this issue is by creating a page and hiding it in our footer called "all restaurants". This page lists and links to every one of our properties. However it isn't exactly user friendly and I would prefer scrapers not to be able to scrape all properties at once! Anyway, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Google Publisher status
Hi all, I just wondered what the general opinion was with regard getting Google publisher status for medium to large organisations. Lots of our clients write a lot of articles & publications and it would be interesting to get some thoughts on how others view Authorship & in particular Publisher credentials. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | davidmaxwell0 -
Can you be penalised in Google for excessive internal keyword linking?
I have an online shop and 3 blogs (with different topics) all set up on sub-domains (for security reasons, don't want Word Press installed in the same hosting space as my shop in case one gets hacked). I have been on the front page of Google for a keyword, lets say 'widgets' for months now. I have been writing blogs about 'widgets', probably about 1/4 of all my blog posts are linking to the 'widgets' page in my shop. I write maybe 1-2 blogs a week, so it's not excessive. This morning I have woken to fine that the widgets page in my shop has vanished from Google's index. So typing in 'widgets' brings up nothing. It hasn't dropped in the rankings, it's just vanished. A few weeks ago I ranked 3 or 4. Then I dropped to about 6. A couple of days ago, i jumped back up to 5 and now it's vanished. If you type in 'buy widgets', or 'widgets online' or 'widgets australia', I have the #1 spot for all those, but for 'widgets', I just don't exist anymore. Could I have been penalised for writing too many posts and keyword linking internally? They're not keyword stuffed and they're well written. I just don't understand what's happened. Right now I"m freaking out about blogging and putting internal links on my website.
Technical SEO | | sparrowdog0 -
Link profile
Hi All, I am doing a link profile audit I have few questions 1. Should i stop worrying about backlinks that i once had and now the websites is down or page is 404 2. The link is nofollow Also i have 60% of my site links few root link and many articles/blogs links pasted in sites without any anchor text, should i worry about them? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Internal Linking
Hello there, I own a "how to" website with 1000+ articles, and the number of articles is growing every day. Often some articles are easier to understand if I link a certain step to an article that was written before, because that article explains the step in more detail. Should I use "read here/read more" or the "title of the article I'm referring to" as anchor text? When is internal linking too much? Should I use nofollow?
Technical SEO | | FisnikSylka0 -
Google Sitelinks
Is there anyway to control the sitelinks under a listing in Google? I have a group of lawyers where 1 of the them is showing up in the sitelinks. They want all of the lawyers to show up. Right now it is showing 1 lawyer, about page, contact us page, etc. Thanks!!!!
Technical SEO | | SixTwoInteractive0 -
Google Indexing
Hi Everybody, I am having kind of an issue when it comes to the results Google is showing on my site. I have a multilingual site, which is main language is Catalan. But of course if I am looking results in Spanish (google.es) or in English (google.com) I want Google to show the results with the proper URL, title and descriptions. My brand is "Vallnord" so if you type this in Google you will be displayed the result in Catalan (Which is not optimized at all yet) but if you search "vallnord.com/es" only then you will be displayed the result in Spanish What do I have to do in order for Google to read this the way I want? Regards, Guido.
Technical SEO | | SilbertAd0 -
Link Share Matrix
Our developers have requested our "Link Share Matrix" - does anyone know what a Link Share Matrix is? Google and the Wiki haven't provided any decent results so I still don't know exactly what it is. Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | Seaward-Group0