As far as I understand it, Google is asking us to add rel="nofollow" to any paid links that we sell on our websites to mark them as links that should not pass on any Page Rank. I'm happy to do this if this is what the great Google God wants but I noticed that this tag doesn't exist on E-consultancy's sponsored links. Am I missing something here or will E-consultancy be doing this sometime soon? I only ask because I'm thinking of adding the tag to all the links we sell and wanted to check that it's now the done thing.

Hi Andrew

When you say Google is 'asking' you to add the rel="nofollow" to any paid links do you mean that this is now accepted best practice or that Google have actually directly told you to do this?

This is an area which I addressed over a year ago (see this post), specifically in relation to the adverts we carry which, as you correctly point out, don't yet have the nofollow attribute.

We haven't yet added this for three main reasons:

1. We sell these ads on the basis of the value that they deliver for the advertising brand in terms of exposure/awareness to a highly relevant audience and for the click throughs. So we're not selling PageRank.

2. We go to great efforts only to include highly relevant advertisers and to contextually target the ads on our own site as best we can. If you look at the ads on this page I think they are all relevant? So I would be happy to argue that it might be no bad thing if we were conferring PageRank value.

3. We assume that Google already knows these are ads (by looking at the code and also seeing the clear description above the ads saying 'Sponsored Links') so won't be giving the outbound links any PageRank juice anyway.

All that said, if Google are saying that ANY paid links (including display ads I assume? Or ads with image and text?) MUST have the rel="nofollow" attribute ... then who are we to argue with that?!

Regards

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com

On 19:26:05 4 November 2007 AndrewRogoff wrote:

As far as I understand it, Google is asking us to add rel="nofollow" to any paid links that we sell on our websites to mark them as links that should not pass on any Page Rank. I'm happy to do this if this is what the great Google God wants but I noticed that this tag doesn't exist on E-consultancy's sponsored links. Am I missing something here or will E-consultancy be doing this sometime soon? I only ask because I'm thinking of adding the tag to all the links we sell and wanted to check that it's now the done thing.

you're right, it is cheeky. but they are the rulers of the internet so we better just do what they say or else we may be punished ;)  this topic has been covered quite a bit by matt cutts:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/

and here is an article about the sites that have been punished:
http://searchengineland.com/071024-093938.php

and here's a bit more reading:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article2777108.ece

On 13:11:43 5 November 2007 danielb wrote:

hi, everyone, how are you?

google's policy is still that you should 'nofollow' any paid links:

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 <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

from: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736&query=nofollow&topic=&type=

They also encourage users to report anyone spotted not following the guidelines!

It all feels a bit cheeky to me.

hope that helps,

daniel

Lawrence, drop a line when you can. giuliano

On 11:54:09 6 November 2007 LawrenceLadomery wrote:
>Interesting to see how some important sites have been
>penalised: (http://searchengineland.com/071024-093938.php)
>http://searchengineland.com/071024-093938.php
>
>No doubt most will do as much as they can to make their
>pages as Google friendly as possible adding nofollow tags
>and perhaps even dropping / limiting theor paid links.
>Will they get their PR back?
>
>I'm wondering whether google bot can differentiate between
>links that occur in lists (eg. on the side of blogs) and
>ones that are occur in paragraphs. The idea being that
>links surrounded by text are more meaningful than links in
>lists which usally point to related content or are site
>navigation.

Perhaps if Google finds words such as 'link', 'exchange', 'price', 'cost', 'advertising' etc... all on one page they will assume that links are being sold? 

Also, there are many link brokers that can be identified from the link's URLs.

Lawrence

On 13:39:42 8 November 2007 juliapendower wrote:

How on earth can Google know if a link is paid for or not? What is it defining as a paid link, and what is the case where link exchanges are agreed for no fees? Or will any link from a commerical site to another commercial site be deemed as paid for?

I am specifically considering the issue of  links from site advertising which may be part of JV arrangements between sites, and where information at the link destination is complimentary to the originating page.

It seems a bit of a minefield to me. Can anyone clarify the situation?