Saturday 14 July, 2007

Buying links

Buying links


You may purchase advertisements outside of AdWords to further promote your web site, and thus your link may appear on other web sites, and provide potential visibility. Any advertising system that is meant to do just that, letting people know of your web site, and providing a link to visit it, is viewed as everyday practice by the Google algorithm. Many affiliate programs and other advertising solutions will provide you with such services. However you should be cautious in what programs to enroll, and only advertise on trusted resources. Sometimes you won't be able to check each and every page for their validity, relevance or trust, and will need an overall understanding of the methods such a media agency is applying.

Known issues


The policy of Google regarding linking behavior applies to every and all links Googlebot finds and indexes from web sites, and thus is of course applied to links that were purchased for advertising. If an advertisement can not be matched up for the pattern of "natural" links ( is showing one or more irregularities, for example it would indicate that its sole purpose is to pass on PageRank from the page it is on ), the links may be discarded, or the URLs on the recipient's or on both ends penalized or banned from the index for the given phrase, or all phrases altogether. Note that the algorithm was designed to average linking behavior and does not penalize otherwise legit and well established web sites. The amount of links that are off-topic, those that are offered site-wide from another domain with occurrences of the thousands, links that are from a web site of another language and are off-topic, are matched up against the linking history of a web site, which will be evaluated based on the complete picture of its linking profile.

+ Resolution: You should never purchase links that are, or could be perceived as serving the sole purpose to raise PageRank / boost other parameters associated with the URL in an unnatural way. Ways to evaluate what could be seen as so include making sure that these references are made for the users, and not just Search Engine bots, thus are accessible for people, are on-topic, and relevant to the content and purpose of the page they reside on. Even so, in case you if have arranged links that you feel to be legitimate advertisements, but could be seen as manipulative for the Google ranking system, you may simply request a rel="nofollow" attribute to be added to each of the outgoing references. This attribute will send the message to the system, that these links are not to pass any parameters, and will thus lift any suspicion of trying to boost rankings by force.

( Example text link: Advertising text ).

For other linking profile related issues read more on Link Schemes and Bad Neighborhood.

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