As your blog grows and becomes more popular, along with the benefits of increased traffic and depending on the nature of you blog increased AdSense earnings or sales comes some dilemmas. People will want to try take advantage of your success in a number of ways. One way unscrupulous marketers may try to take advantage of an Unwary blogger is an approach with an interest in buying a text link within a post.
A text link or hyper link is the name given to links you probably add to all your posts. If you write a post about Spice Up Your Blog you might add a link to Spice Up Your Blog within the post. These links help the site you link to in a number of ways, as we have previously covered Google follow links so if you add a link to this blog Google will follow that link and crawl this blog. Google also use links to determine the importance of a site, the more links Google find to Spice Up Your Blog the more importance they credit to it, basic SEO.
The Problem With Selling Text Links
There are billions of links throughout the Internet and most are natural.I might like your blog so i link to it, i might like a service or gadget so i link to it.As this blog has a page rank of 3 and many posts have a page rank of three a link from here could be very helpful.So what if you could Buy a link from my blog to your blog ? Simply send me a few bucks and i add a link to your blog in one of my posts.Well understandably Google don’t like this as it effects the search results in an unnatural way.The search results you see are carefully generated using in dept technology to make sure the most relevant results are displayed highest.If someone could simply buy lots of links this would push them up the search rankings even though the site could be of poor quality and little relevance.
OK so you can see why Google don’t like the sale of links and if you are suspected of selling links you will be penalised. In fact your Page Rank could be taken away and you could loose all search traffic from Google, a heavy penalty considering the potential traffic from Google. Currently over 70% of traffic to this blog comes from Google.
So if you get contacted by someone looking to buy a link within your blog as tempting as it may be (I have been offered $750 for one text link on a post) your answer has to be no.
Nofollow Text Links
It is worth mentioning Nof ollow text links. Some time back i covered how to create Nofollow links that will not be followed by search engines. It is actually OK to sell a No follow link but it kind a defeats the purpose for the buyer so they wont be interested. Below is a video By Matt Cutts Of Google on the subject.
This is a fairly basic description of why selling text links is a bad idea but I’m sure you get the idea, have you been approached by someone looking to buy a link on your blog ?
Drop your Comments, Views and Questions below.
