Google Bans Paid Links and Adds Report Paid Links Form

Google, which has historically been against paid links, added a new section to the Google Webmaster tools. It’s called Report paid links, and it is just that.

Their blog post says:

Links are an important signal in our PageRank calculations, as they tend to indicate when someone has found a page useful. Links that are purchased are great for advertising and traffic purposes, but aren’t useful for PageRank calculations. Buying or selling links to manipulate results and deceive search engines violates our guidelines.

Today, in response to your request, we’re providing a paid links reporting form within Webmaster Tools. To use the form, simply log in and provide information on the sites buying and selling links for purposes of search engine manipulation. We’ll review each report we get and use this feedback to improve our algorithms and improve our search results. in some cases we may also take individual action on sites.

If you are selling links for advertising purposes, there are many ways you can designate this, including:

* Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the href tag
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

It will be very interesting to see how Text-Link-Ads is going to react, if at all.

Good move by Google? Bad move? Let me know in the comments.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

Technorati Tags: paid links, google, webmaster tools, text link ads

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Thanks for the link to their blog post. Google’s report paid links form does’t have information about “nofollow” links, and I was about to ask this very question until I finished reading your post here.

Didn’t take long- google brings out links as way of ranking and then others build a buisness around it.

There should be a mix too -does this mean the paid directory links are included? probaly not…its the links at the bottom of the page….and abuse of it. Purchasing anything advertising “just for google” -is not a good situation.

Best Regards
Paul Easton

[edited spam links]

Google has been doing so many changes in the past year that its hard to keep up. How does google enforce this rule? How do they know that links are being paid for?

Regards
Neil