Google has blogged, spoken verbally at public conferences, and have made it public that they do not condone people buying links with the intention of manipulating their rankings. This has not always been Google’s stance on the situation. To be honest this situation didn’t exists some time ago. Its just recently with the outbreak of “buying links for TBPR” that Google’s engineers have made it evident that they are aware of the situation at hand and are taking countermeasures. Some of these include situations where they will block a sites ability to pass PR, link popularity etc if they are supposedly selling links.

Could this all be a ploy by Google to protect their bottom line (ie. Adwords)? Perhaps they just say their doing this to strike fear in Webmasters. Webmasters who par take in advertising with contextual links on others sites to help drive traffic and awareness of their site.

Google has stated if you wish to buy text links then to place a Nofollow tag around them, blocking their “vote” essentially. However, if links were around before Google was established, who’s to say that you have to place Nofollow just because they want you to? The foundation of Googles algorithms were even based and still are based on the underling link structure holding it together.

Until Google changes their algorithms’ link based ranking system, in my opinion there will always be that fine line of contextual link advertisements. Whether you decide to exercise Nofollow tags on your links is up to you however.

Just remember that advertising is advertising. Google is not going to abandon there search engine architecture and completely devalue links, doing so would ruin there SERPS and would essentially create a completely new collection of search results, across the board.

If your adverts bring in quality traffic, then utilize the system for what its worth. Why shoot yourself in the foot by integrating Nofollow tags around your advertisements.

Posted in Linking 101 |