Paid Links and Google

So, this guy contacts me the other day. Wants to pay me $200 to put up a couple of paragraphs of text (with links in them) on this site.

Now, before we get to how screwed up his offer was, read what Google says about paid links. Google blogger Matt Cutts has opined in the negative on this for over two years, campaigning against paid or exchanged links that have the sole purpose of influencing search rankings.

Furthermore, Google added a way to report paid links around 5 months back.

Now back to the guy. His offer was a one-time $200 payment: $120 for a permanent paragraph of links on the front page and $40 each for permanent paragraphs of links on two internal pages (both of which had previously been slashdotted and had a lot of incoming links).

First, on those interior pages, the weight those links would carry was worth more than $40... until Google got wise and discounted all outgoing links from those pages or even the whole site. Second, you never ever sell a permanent spot on your homepage. Homepage real estate is always leased, never sold.

Now, when you've got a blog that's not earning you John Chow money, your reputation is all you have that's of any value. And even if your reputation with Google is decided on by a robot and known only to that robot, would you be willing to lose it for a mere $200?

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.