Hi guys,

I’ve witnessed a lot of discussion about paid links, lately. Is it right to buy / sell text links? Why do you do it? PageRank? better SERP? etc etc. Logically, you’ll get tons of differing opinions to these issues since everyone has his/her own perspective about it.

It’s a fact that Google hates paid links. So do the rest of the SEs. They think that links should be built naturally so if they catch a paid link, both the site and the targeted URL will get a negative hit from them affecting their SERP and ranking. If what you want is traffic and pageviews then you’ll be fine, but if you’re after getting a good PR then you may consider yourself screwed up.

A good technique to prevent any harm from link exchanging / paid links is by adding the attribute rel=nofollow to them in order to preserve your link juice and keep your site penalty-free. If your site is Wordpress powered, then this tutorial by Zain from KnowledgeConstructs.com will come in handy for you.

However, the nofollow technique has an major drawback: the link itself loses value since it won’t be passing authority from other site to another making it harder to improve ranking and visibility. Can you imagine what would happen if everyone added a nofollow to all their links? No one would ever get a chance to get a better PR or SERP. Don’t overuse this. Nofollow should be used on paid links and exchange links only.

I believe that SEs must change their ranking algorithm. Don’t know, maybe taking into context the sites and their relationship with the neighborhoods they’re interlinking with. My site is about web developing so why should I be linking with a site about finance? The spiders should see the correlation between the two sites and act accordingly.

Get my point now?