My main sponsor on The Canadian Financial Place, informed me last week that they wanted me to change how I linked to their site, and that they wanted me to add:
Google Page Rank?
rel="nofollow"
to the HREF tag that I had to their site. This struck me as very odd, since they were paying for the link in their ad, but they informed me that due to Google’s new rules, they (and I) could get into deep trouble with Google if I did not do this.
NoFollow Explanation
Why do we have to do this?
If you do not follow this guideline you will likely lose your ranking in Google.
Advertisements are sometimes also known as “paid links” because someone is paying you (the website owner) to place a link on your page that points to another page. That link might be an image ad or a text ad, but it will virtually always be something on your page that links to another page. These links that someone bought were not put there for editorial or natural reasons, they were put there because someone paid for it.
This was excerpted from the FeedTheBot post linked to above. I have since gone through other posts and added a great deal more rel=”nofollow” attributes to links that might be construed as being “paid for” and such.
I am hoping this should:
- Stop me from losing my Page Rank (which is currently 4)
- OR may help me get a higher page rank, we shall see
It seems odd to me to add the NoFollow attribute to the paid link, but I suppose upon reflection, it is showing Google what links are genuine informational links and which are more commercial in nature.
The rel=”nofollow” attribute is a fundamental part of SEO these days. Its better to comply with the rules of Google instead of to be caught napping. The steps and reasons given by the Canadian sponsors make sense.
After all, no one wants to be in the ‘bad books’ of the ‘Almighty’ Google. Other businesses promoting paid links should take cue from the lessons of this short post!
In kingged.com – the content syndication and social networking website for Internet marketers, I have left the above comment where I found this post.
Sunday – kingged.com contributor
http://kingged.com/nofollow-attribute-on-sponsored-links/
BCJ, leaving links as ‘do-follow’ is perfectly acceptable on commercial links as long as you’re not getting paid. i.e don’t start going through your blog and inserting nofollow’s on every link just becuase it links to a commercial site – there’s nothing wrong with linking to commercial sites.
Google’s problem is with paid links, not commercial links.
I’ll leave it as an exercise why you feel the need to modify your website based on the vague whims of Google.
Google is the 800 lb gorilla right now in terms of search engines. How does Google’s algorithm figure out which are “paid” and which aren’t? That is the interesting question.