Attention to blogger: Make sure you use the “no follow” tag for outbound links if that link is for a paid post.
This warning is not meant to only enhance your blog’s pagerank but is really important because as Matt Cutts said in a recent post,“We do take the subject of paid posts seriously and take action on them.” In fact they take it so seriously that Matt Cutts is urging his readers to help them find violators of the Google’s guideline on link schemes by sending in reports of sites and blogs that participate in such schemes. They actually manually review links sent to them. And the penalty as Matt Cutts puts it is that “those blogs are not trusted in Google’s algorithms any more.” We know what that means – goodbye to your hopes of having a decent pagerank!
You don’t have to worry about your paid posts it isn’t what Google penalizes it’s only the paid posts that passes pagerank. So if you do have paid posts on your blog and have not been using the “no follow” tag then it’s high time you get to it by editing those posts and adding the necessary tags.
Google’s Guideline on Paid Links
Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results… Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such by either:
- Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the tag; or
- Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
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Damn the G-Dictatorship. They should rank in a better way, not force publishers to mess about with code.
[...] note that you should still remember to use the “no follow” tag for paid links (See my post “Google Says Use No Follow for Paid Posts or Else…”). It pays to preserve the value of your links but not at the expense of being tagged by Google as a [...]