Careful with the Paid Posts

Posted by scoop on March 31st, 2009 in Blog Advertising, SEO |

I am all for blog monetization but when you advertise anything on your blog you should always be careful not to offend Google. In Noemi’s post early this month she explained why bloggers that rely on paid posts for revenue should be very careful about using the “no follow” tag for paid links.

It seems that Google’s policy on paid links indicate that the activity itself is not banned as long as pagerank is not passed for these links. Google takes the issue very seriously so much so that they even manually review sites and blogs they become aware of that may be passing pagerank to paid links. To ensure that you don’t get in any trouble with Google they advice you to simply:

1. Use the “no follow” tag ; or
2. Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Remember no paid link is worth getting penalized by Google. If a blog advertiser requires you to pass pagerank on links turn down the offer. Most blog advertisers choose to advertise on blogs not just because their target market coincides with the blog’s niche audience but also because of that blog’s pagerank. If your pagerank drops because of this issue you will lose even more advertisers so say no to that one advertiser and ensure your blog’s future. If you still have paid links with “no follow” tags now is the time to add the tags.