What is a Paid Link or Paid Inclusion?
"Paid inclusion is a search engine marketing model in which Web site owners pay a search engine company to guarantee their sites will show up in search results."
But then this definition changed when this process of buying links spreads from search engines to individually run websites and blogs. Companies started preferring to have their links shown on a blog having higher visitors or Page Rank with more visibility i.e. having a small banner on side bars of a web page or a banner at the end of the article.
Now according to Page Rank Theory, each web page having some Page Rank pass its juice equally to the links placed on that page. Someone then publish a theory that High Page Rank is effecting your ranking in Google SERP's.
After this a new era of paid linking starts. People start placing their adds on the webpages having high Page Rank.
This situation alert Google
About its Paid Link Program known as AdWords and it start yelling that Paid Links are spam and they should be taken down.(According to Google, Adwords doesn't pass Page Rank, but who knows? Yahoo claims the similar thing about its directory, but every one knows that listing in yahoo directory not only got a significant change in Yahoo Search ranking but also a boost in Google Page Rank and Google SERP's). But who don't like to earn? ofcourse people utilizes there energy, money and time and if they are getting ROI cause of it, its their right to have it. So nobody cares about Google Yelling and bloggers and website owners kept showing links on their website or blog for a little sum of money. Many Start-up comes into being for this purpose to connect Link Publishers and companies and earn as a middleman. Of course this is the limit of Google Anger and recently it openly starts penalizing the websites involve in this business and showing who is the boss. It drops the Page Rank of many websites as a starter warning but this could go beyond the Page Rank. Since Page Rank is an important factor when buying links so it fires the blogger world and we have seen some harsh
kool comments over Google Policy in previous week. But Google don't have time to reanalyze its policies so it just ignore all of them.
Here are some Google clarification over their Paid Links Policy
- According to Google co-founder Larry Page, any search result that was paid for should be clearly marked as an ad.
- Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:
* Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the link
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
- According to Google, Paid Links are meant to pass the Page Rank to other blogs and thats why they are not good. So we should use rel=nofollow tag on every paid link we have on our blog to stop passing page rank to them.
So, let's see I placed an add on a page with zero page rank with out NOFOLLW. Is Google still penalized me? If we see Google Paid Link Policy than I should not be penalized cause I am not passing any Page Rank but we don't have an answer of this question yet.
Then how can Google know this is Paid Link? A link of my friend's sites without NOFOLLOw in my side bar can be declared As a Paid Link by Google but a paid link in my main article can't even recognize by Google as paid link.
Of course, they can do what they want with their own software. But at least give a clear definition on
HOW OR WHAT METHODS THEY ARE USING TO MARK PAID LINKS so we can do some counter. But we only have an official statement from Matt Cutts that
Yes! this Page Rank drop down is due to Paid Links."A good thing is that, this time Google decided only to give a warning by dropping that green pixels only. Nobody claims about loss of SERPS or ranking on general. SEOMOZ gives a nice data regarding this issue. You will find it really interesting. Take a look here.
LINKBTW Yahoo directory goes from 9 to 7 and Business.com also goes from 8 to 7.
