To those who don't know what paid links do, here is a brief intro. Paid links basically serve two purposes. It increases web traffic to your website - provided the link(s) is placed in a higher ranked portal - and in the process, it also helps increase it's Page Rank. Now, there lies the catch. Search engines such as Google have no problem whatsoever with people placing paid links in their/other websites. But, their opposition is to the fact that having paid links in the site(s) could influence its PR as well, if not directly. Incidentally, there are webmasters out there who deliberately use paid links to enhance their website's PR, something Google looks down upon not so kindly.

In fact, Google themselves have proposed a way out of this conundrum, without hurting either party. That is, in order to avoid Google's punishing methods for deliberate spamming, they suggested that those who wish to use paid links to draw more netizens to their websites may put a 'nofollow' attribute in the said link so that the search engine spider could deduce that it is a link for building web traffic (and hence not to follow it while indexing), and has no relation whatsoever with page relevance or Page Rank.

Websites which had not bothered to heed Google's advice have already paid heavily for their misadventures. For the high ranked, high traffic sites, Google's tap on the knuckles till now had been relatively soft. There weren't any outright banning of such sites. Google doesn't want to compromise on their marketing interests in terms of ads in one stroke. Hence they were only demoted in PR. But a similar soft stance can't be expected for smaller websites; in fact, they have banned some of them from appearing in SRPs.

It is true that for Google, it is practically impossible to catch hold of every bit of spamming happening in the portals of cyberspace. But, as mentioned above, if Google ever catches hold of such misadventures, such sites will be promptly penalized. So let your portal never suffer the same fate due to any sort of link building carelessness from your own part.

To Your Success!


Serge Daudelin
Affordable Search Engine Optimization Services

Serge Daudelin is a Search Engine Optimization(http://affordable-search-engine-optimization-services.com) specialist and consultant who has written over 300 articles in print and 5 published ebooks. Serge is dedicated to helping others and offering the best information on how to make more money online.

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