Which Links to No-Follow?

Google doesn’t like it when you pay for links. It doesn’t matter if you are paying cold hard cash, trading favors or promising services – it’s all the same to them, and it’s all taboo – the rule is NO using paid links to give your rankings a boost!

This doesn’t mean you can’t buy links. Just make sure you no-follow such them, or use other methods to make sure  Google disregards them. Paid links in the right places can be valuable for driving traffic as long as Google doesn’t think you are trying to pull a fast one, and convince them to use this type of link to determine your site’s value.

However, there still is one area where inbound links can look a little gray hat. Links from blogs and social sites are increasingly valuable, so what is kosher? If people addicted to Digg see your information being Dugg all over and decide to link to you, that is their choice – no grey area at all. But what if you paid a consultant to do a review and post it to Digg?>

Matt Cutts says ‘Whenever you pay money to a social media consultant to try to show up on Digg, you are not paying for links. You are funding some creativity; you are sponsoring your page for some creativity.’

Well, Google might not mind, but Digg doesn’t like content submitted by such ‘media consultants’. Bad example perhaps – but this could still be relevant to other sites – people are paying media ‘gurus’ to run everything from Facebook to Twitter campaigns these days.

A noteworthy concern addresses the outright paying for a review on a social site or blog. Suppose I ask a blog owner to do a rockin’ review of my product or service. Well, I should no-follow any link the blog owner uses in his review, because I did pay for that one, but what about the (hopefully) hundreds of people who read the blog, check out my site and decide to link because of the superlative quality I have to offer?

I didn’t pay them.  Those links are as natural, and I don’t have to no-follow them; these people really truly are linking to me because they think I have something of value to offer. The fact that they found me through the blog review doesn’t count against me – it’s creative marketing.

So – nofollow any links you directly pay, barter, or bribe people for, but anything outside that or resulting from such activity is fair play.

Happy Linking!