Webmasters paying money to garner links will now have a tough time in keeping their link building campaigns on the right track. Google, the biggest player in the search marketing industry, has announced latest webmaster guidelines that clearly state its disposition on this matter.
Google analyses both quality and quantity of links pointing to a site during the process of indexing. However, it'll now take a tougher stand on links that have been paid for. This is because an increasing number of webmasters are simply trying to consolidate their optimisation campaign by paying money to irrelevant web sources.
Buying or selling links for PageRank can have a negative impact on your site, resulting in a loss of rankings on the search engine's result listings. However, you can still buy links for advertising purposes.
Such links should be easily identifiable, and this can be done through some simple tactics like:
- Use the rel=“nofollow” attribute for the link's <> tag, so that the search engine crawler does not follow the link back to its source of origin.
- Use a robots.txt file to redirect such links to an intermediate page that has been already blocked by search engines.
If you are a webmaster, just be a little more careful when building links. Try something original and do not try to manipulate search engines – you cannot be successful at it all the time.
