Paid Links And SEO
Two great examples of paid links and SEO crossed my desk this week. We are doing outreach to experts and influencers in a certain industry by asking them to share a blog post with their followers.
Here are the two responses:
They're both pretty blatant. The sites didn't look all that bad when we sent out the request, and there certainly wasn't anything to indicate they expected money for their efforts. If they had, I would have never taken the time to send them the request.
Notice the second one has an ascending pay scale according to Domain Authority (DA). Also notice the link is only good for one year. That's a clever way to trying to develop consistent passive income. I looked at most of the sites listed, and here's what many of them have in common:
- The templates repeat themselves - there are basically three template designs being used
- Every site has the standard FCC disclaimer about paid affiliate links
- Many of them have blogrolls listed
I'd like to know how these sites got high DA, but for all I know, they just made that up to sell more placement.
What Google Says About Paid Links And SEO
Google actually has a couple things to say about paid links. The TL;DR is that if the search engine detects a lot of paid links coming and going, that could spawn a penalty. And, Gary Illyes a Googler, said they ignore paid links from publications anyways for ranking purposes.
If you want to pay for article placement to increase your brand awareness or for vanity reasons, I say go for it. But if you're trying to get backlinks and targeted traffic to your own pages, this is not the way to go. I guarantee you Google knows about these sites and are monitoring them carefully, and if there's one thing (among many) that Google's good at, it's applying guilt by association. In other words, you're as bad as they are.
If you're not sure about how to get links safely, take an advanced SEO training class with Invenio SEO. We come to your location and customize the SEO curriculum to your specific website situation.
Until we meet again, keep it safely between the ditches!
All the very best to you,
Nancy McDonald
Screenshots courtesy of author, July 2018
