Paid outbound links - do they have juice?
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Hi,
A client is asking about a website that has a business model I don't normally work with - it's a site full of very informative articles - no harm there - and they are sponsored by companies who provide the service being discussed. Not really any harm there. But attached to the link is an outbound tracking device. The business model is pay per click. Has anyone had experience with this, specifically if larger search engines have picked up on this and filtered out those types of links to not count very much if at all?
Thanks!
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Thank you both! So sorry on the delay to respond. Makes sense!
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You said there's outbound link tracking. Check if those links are nofollowed as Ryan suggested. You can also check if if they are something like www.thatsite.com/redirect.php?id=1 and if the redirect.php has a noindex or www.thatsite.com/robots.txt has a disallow or something like that.
If the links are redirects via a tracking, they are not really being counted towards the linked to site's backlinks anyways, so I don't think there are any issues here.
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Those links should have the "nofollow" tag applied to them as they are sponsored or paid links. If they do not have the tag applied, it is highly likely Google devalues those links anyway.
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