In this article of the SEO (search engine optimisation) news, I am going to be talking to you about paid links. Many paid links are frowned upon throughout the SEO industry, although not all paid links are classed as black hat techniques. In the words of Google, paid links are fine if they are done strictly for advertising purposes and attracting more visitors to the site. However if the link is created to manipulate the search engines and get the website a better ranking in the search engine results (SERPs) then this is considered a black hat technique. Search engines such as Google are trying to make their systems automatically detect these types of paid links, and penalise the offending websites that use such techniques in order to manipulate the search results. Although this does sound a bit optimistic on Google’s side, as it would be hard to tell if a paid link is definitely paid for, and created in order to manipulate search results. There are a few ways which I will list that Google will see as genuine advertisement links, but getting every person doing search engine optimisation to follow these guidelines will be a big task in itself, and it is still not guaranteed that everyone will follow them. There will still be the black hat SEO’s out there who will try and manipulate the search results in any way they can.

Google says you can do one or both of these following techniques in order for your links to be classed as advertisement.

• Using a rel=”nofollow” in the links, e.g. <a href=”myurl.com” rel=”nofollow”>MyURL</a>
• Redirect the user to a page which is blocked from search engines (via robots.txt)

This is not an exact science though, and from time to time Google may get it wrong trying to tell if a link is paid for advertising or for SERPs manipulation. They even recommend that you let them know of websites you believe are breaking this rule. Allowing people to suggest URLs that are infringing such terms is a great idea, and will help make search results better, and making sure they are good quality links.

In this article I have spoken with you about paid links and there affects on the search engines. I hope this has encouraged you to make sure you only purchase links for advertising, and not to manipulate the search results. If not, be careful as Google will be hunting you down.