Affiliate Programs

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Last week I told you about David Airey and his Google Penalty and what steps he was taking to reverse it.

Now more sites are being hit with Google Penalties, although the penalties this time are not quite as severe as the one handed to David and others.

This morning I was reading Court’s ”Make Money Online“ blog and saw where Google had penalized his blog with a PR penalty for selling links.

Not only was Court’s blog penalized, but in his post he sited other blogs and websites that Google penalized as well.

Here’s a short-list of sites whose visible PageRank has been dropped for allegedly selling links (keyword allegedly because I have no idea whether they do or don’t):

• CourtneyTuttle.com - visible PR dropped from PR3 to PR2
• JohnChow.com - visible PR dropped from PR6 to PR5
• Statcounter.com - visible PR dropped from PR9 to PR8
• AndyBeard.eu - visible PR dropped from PR5 to PR4
• Stanford Daily - visible PR dropped from PR9 to PR7
• NetBusinessBlog - visible PR dropped from PR9 to PR7

That’s quite a list of reputable blogs and Websites!

It seems that Google is fighting back hard against paid links.  Even Text-Link-Ads doesn’t show up in the top Google SERPS when you type in the query “Text Link Ads”.

Brian Clark over at CopyBlogger also has a timely post about paid links and describes his blog’s strategy rely less on traffic from Google. 

Basically Brian relies on Subscribers and Social Media to drive traffic and higher profits for his blog and doesn’t rely on Google traffic as much as others. It’s a good post, go and take a look.

Lastly, we have excellent advice from people like Jim Boykin. His post about Google penalizing sites selling paid links is right on the money IMHO.

How To Prevent Google From Penalizing Your Web Site

Here are a few tips to keep your site from being penalized from Google.

1. Don’t sell paid links.
2. If you do sell paid links, use the NoFollow attribute in  your link structure like this “rel=”nofollow” (without the quotes of course)
3. Court has a disclaimer on his Advertisement page that his paid links do not pass PR. I’m not 100% sold that Google is okay with this but if I was going to sell links in my side bar, I’d certainly use such a disclaimer.

How To Sell Links and Avoid A Google Penalty…Maybe

For quite a while now, I’ve said that if you want to sell links on your website, they should be in the form of Anchor text in a post. From my experiments, 1 link with descriptive anchor text in a relevant post is nearly as good, and in many cases better, than site wide sidebar links.

When it comes to paid links and Google, I tend to follow the advice of Jim Boykin. Jim is one of my favorite SEO bloggers because he understands that there are some things Google can not do, like find well placed paid links!

If you must sell links on your site, do it discreetly with anchor text in a relevant post or use the “NoFollow” attribute. I believe that most people and companies buying paid links want some link love and may shy away from sites using the “NoFollow” attribute.

Just remember, you’ve been warned!