Should "all" paid links be nofollow?

[froggyboy604]

I saw a video by Matt cutts from Google who said that paid links should all be nofollow since it is manipulating the search results. Do you try make all links which are paid nofollow on your website. I also read it can lower your rankings in Google or have your website un-indexed.

[youtube]FBtFclJW_8Q[/youtube]

 

[Jonathan]

Google says so, and Google runs this

 

[hcfwesker]

Whats the difference in making a link follow or no follow, like is there a way you wwrite the link in.

 

[Jonathan]

Whats the difference in making a link follow or no follow, like is there a way you wwrite the link in.

nofollow:

<a href="http://google.com/" rel="nofollow" />

dofollow:

<a href="http://google.com/" />

dofollow essentially is just no nofollow

From Google: Paid links: A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. In order to prevent paid links from influencing search results and negatively impacting users, we urge webmasters use nofollow on such links. Search engine guidelines require machine-readable disclosure of paid links in the same way that consumers online and offline appreciate disclosure of paid relationships (for example, a full-page newspaper ad may be headed by the word "Advertisement"). More information on Google's stance on paid links.

http://www.google.com/support/webmaster ... swer=96569

 

[el canadiano]

Google doesn't seem to like people who sell text links for search engine optimization. It's basically considered black hat. Making paid links "nofollow" will defeat the purpose of having it up in the first place, but it still passes link juice over to the new site.

 

[froggyboy604]

Making paid links dofollow can also prevent websites with less money from ranking high in Google according to some blog articles I read since if a few very rich webmaster who are willing to spend thousands of dollars on paid links, they can dominate a specific keyword till search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc finds out, or he gets reported for buying a bunch of paid links.

Sort of like how independent music struggle to get themselves notice in the past when unethical entertainment marketers used money (payola) to bribe a radio station or Disc Jockey to play their clients song more often on the radio.

Definition for Payola: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola

However, I think if the nofollow link site is useful, visitors might link to it like how I posts links to cheap products like web hosting on forums and blogs to inform members that GoDaddy is having a 99 cent sale on domain and most of the links for forums and blogs are dofollow in the content/post areas.

 

[David]

Google doesn't seem to like people who sell text links for search engine optimization. It's basically considered black hat. Making paid links "nofollow" will defeat the purpose of having it up in the first place, but it still passes link juice over to the new site.

People do click links. Search Engines aren't everything on the Internet; users are much more important. This is where you're going to get consistent traffic and genuine traffic.

SEOMoz provides two articles on this: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/when-paid-lin ... t-blackhat and http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-importanc ... llow-links

 

[vash]

As a matter of interest what do you do DotDavic?

Personally I prefer almost all links to be nofollow.

 

[David]

Well, Google does look at your intentions. I like to go with Wikipedia on this and have all outbound links as nofollow and any internal links as dofollow.

However, it really depends on how you structure your link. If Googlebot goes down your page and sees the last line of coding, with small font, and very optimized, with dofollow, then clearly your intentions are to pass PageRank juice. Google clearly doesn't want to see that.