Remarkablogger

The practice of accepting money for links is longstanding and has always been controversial. Services exist to broker and facilitate paid links between buyers and sellers, taking their cut off the top. The most famous of these is Text Link Ads. Some new ones have appeared, recently, but I’ll get into that later.

Paid links can also be completely private and “under the table,” sort of like private text link ads. They target certain keywords in various posts a blogger has written — often posts with a medium to high Google PageRank. This is because what the link sellers are after is PageRank (traffic, too, but mostly PageRank). PageRank is a number from 0 (bad) to 10 (super-mega-awesome) assigned by Google to individual web pages. A page’s PageRank affects that page’s performance in Google search results. If a site is linked to by high PageRank pages, its search results rankings may be boosted.

Google does not want this to happen because of manipulation or brokering of links in a marketplace. Google feels that this compromises the integrity of their search. Because of this, Google has punished sites that sell paid links by downgrading or even revoking all PageRank they once had. So, not only are paid links themselves controversial, but Google’s response is also controversial. Many bloggers and business owners see this as Google telling people how to run their business in order to stay in Google’s good graces.

This sort of thing is part of the gray areas of internet search marketing and optimization world. It’s not like a friendly “add me to your blogroll” thing.

Google feels that these links should use the “no-follow” attribute so that they don’t get seen by Google when it updates its search index by scanning (crawling is the term) your site for new content (when you search online, you’re not searching the live internet, you’re searching Google’s index of the internet). The no-follow attribute is not officially part of the HTML specification, by the way. It’s purely an invention of Google. You can see why some people take issue with what they see as Google telling webmasters how to run a website. But hey, it’s Google’s index, and without integrity and trustworthiness, people would stop using Google to search, so they have a point.

Now, that’s just the background information you need to know before you can make any kind of reasonably informed decision about this! (Blogging will turn you into a nerd, yet!)

For me, what it all boils down to is the same issue with affliate links in blog posts: will your readers respect you more… or less? Would the paid links benefit your readers, or would they only benefit your wallet while degrading the quality of your posts? If you personally and privately broker paid links, you can keep a tight rein on their quality and relevance… but then the greed creep starts! People get greedy and they start thinking about the money instead of the quality. They compromise their integrity and they sell out.

Secondarily, there is the issue of whether or not you want to be punished by Google for selling do-follow text links. That scenario can be avoided by using a paid text link service that uses no-follow. In many cases, the whole point of buying and selling text links is to increase PageRank. If paid links are no-follow, then the reason is for exposure and traffic only. LinkWorth is one of the few paid links brokers that lets you sell no-follow links (except that you won’t sell very many, because advertisers aren’t interested in them). Bottom line is that if you’re going to play this game, you either play dirty or you don’t play.

PS - for whatever reason, I just couldn’t get the video right on this one. Finally, I abandoned my “script” and just shot from the lip. The result is the same basic message as the text, but different enough to warrant attention to both if you want slightly overlapping information.