Are there any "legitimate" paid links in Google's eyes?
-
The news about paid link campaigns is so frequent, that I have to ask the question....does Google allow any paid links?
Aside from SEO, paid links can have visibility value. Much like an exit sign on the highway, the paid link says "Get off here"
-
Good response Barry. According to GA, some directories perform better than others. We assign a two-tiered cost index (cost per visit vs. cost per action). We obviosuly cull the directories that don't perform well.
Most of these are small regional sites that get significant local TV exposure and are quite cheap ($25). The group that makes the cut (see paragraph above) perform quite well.
Good point on the no-follow, but many of these probably don't have the sophistication to understand no-follow.
-
Do you mean that you'll be paying for sponsored listings, that these directories require payment for submission or that these directories require payment for review of the site?
If a sponsored listing, I'm pretty sure they should be nofollowed as it's technically an ad.
If they require payment for submission (ie, no cleverly worded terms of acceptance) then you shouldn't really be buying them.
If payment for review of your site, technically that's fine (though in reality very few sites will ever reject a paying site).
Ultimately, unless you're on some very shady directories, Google's not going to be able to tell what you've paid for and what you haven't.
Are you sure any of these directories actually get any sort of traffic anyway? I know as SEOs we all use them, but as a web user I've not looked at a directory since 1990.
-
Let's think more broadly. I have a client who wants to target brides to be. Obviously, a great source of visibility would be wedding related directories. It would be of great value (perhaps even greater than search in some cases) to have listings in these directories.
However, I certainly wouldn't want to be blacklisted.
In this instance, I would be using paid links to boost my online visibility in general, not to game SERPs. How can Google reconcile that?
-
As EGOL said, there are some paid for directories that are accepted (even authoritative) by Google.
Yahoo business directory, BOTW, Business[dot]com and JoeAnt to name a few.
That said I almost never use any of them now, the value isn't there to be in a page 12 levels down with no links in.
-
In addition to directories that charge for editors reviews or an approval process deeper than "pay and get listed", I think there are a few others. Any group like the BBB that give members a page or a link on their site are legit too. You aren't paying them for the link, but to be a member of their organization. Some of these sites are very similar to directories but a lot aren't.
A lot of charities will also give a link to donors, although this starts to get a little fishy with abuse.
-
Right.... If I started a directory under the "pay me for a review" basis and gave people followed links I bet that Google would bust me.
-
I always thought Google's policy towards the Yahoo Directory was strange. However, perhaps it teaches us that if the directory charges for something other then placement (i.e. pay us and we'll expedite adding your listing to our directory) then the paid link is "legitimate".
-
does Google allow any paid links?
Google is the biggest seller of paid links on this planet.... Adwords... lol
The Yahoo! Directory is a white hat place to pay for a link.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ranking Fluctuation on "Canvas Prints" keyword in google.co.uk
Hello Moz We are struggling for "canvas prints" ranking in google.co.uk since last 2 years. every time in SERP my webpage has been changed. i want to rank this URL on this particular keyword - "canvas prints" Can you tell me why my page has been fluctuate every time in SERP's. mtwpvf
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CommercePundit1 -
Google says 404s don't cause ranking drops, but what about a lot of them
Hello, According to Google here, 404s don't cause rankings to go down. Our rankings are going down and we have about 50 or so 404s (though some may have been deindexed by now). We have about 300 main products and 9000 pages in general on this Ecommerce site. There's no link equity gained by 301 redirecting the 404s. A custom 404 page has been made linking to the home page. There's nothing linking to the pages that are 404s Provided that no more 404s are created, can I just ignore them and find the real reason our rankings are going down?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Link Audit: How do I decide what is a good or bad link?
I am conducting a link audit for one of my formerly high-ranking pages. But despite reading quite a bit on the issue, I am still quite confused as to how to decide whether to keep or remove a link. Some links come from directories and social bookmarking sites. I know that generally speaking, you do not want to be on these types of sites, but what if their domain authorities, pageranks, and mozTrusts scores are good? For example, here is one of my links for "envelopes": http://www.folkd.com/detail/www.jampaper.com%2FEnvelopes The page itself has no MozRank, MozTrust, or links but the domain has an authority of 88, a MozRank of 6.41, a mozTrust of 6.31. Should I be looking on a page level or domain level basis? It also has over 5 million links, with over two million of those being external followed links. Is the high quantity of links a warning sign? I also used a free online tool (thesitevalue.com) to determine how much traffic the domain gets. Apparently it receives over 350,000 unique visits daily, so it must be useful to people. This, combined with the fact that we've received 5 visits from the link over the last year (not a lot, but something), makes me believe that the link's intent wasn't purely to "trick" Google. Despite this, I still have a feeling the link could be considered low-quality based on the domain's appearance. Similarly, some of our links are coming from domains named linkdirect.info, backlinks8.com, tolinkup.com, findyourlink.info, searchengineurl.com, websubmissionfree.com. Is it safe to assume these are harmful links strictly because of their names? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jampaper0 -
Removing/ Redirecting bad URL's from main domain
Our users create content for which we host on a seperate URL for a web version. Originally this was hosted on our main domain. This was causing problems because Google was seeing all these different types of content on our main domain. The page content was all over the place and (we think) may have harmed our main domain reputation. About a month ago, we added a robots.txt to block those URL's in that particular folder, so that Google doesn't crawl those pages and ignores it in the SERP. We now went a step further and are now redirecting (301 redirect) all those user created URL's to a totally brand new domain (not affiliated with our brand or main domain). This should have been done from the beginning, but it wasn't. Any suggestions on how can we remove all those original URL's and make Google see them as not affiliated with main domain?? or should we just give it the good ol' time recipe for it to fix itself??
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | redcappi0 -
Black linking exploitation
Hi all After watching our ranking for some primary keywords drop on Google from page 1 to 20 and then totally off the charts in relatively short period I've recently discovered through moz tools that our website along with other competitor sites are victims to black linking (may have the terminology wrong). Two primary words are anchor linked to our domain (www.solargain.com.au) being sex & b$tch through over 4000 compromised sites - mostly Wordpress - many which are high profile sites. Searching through the source code through half a dozen compromised sites I noticed that competitors are also linked using other derogatory terms, but the patterns indicate batch or clustered processing. The hacker has left some evidence as to whom they are representing as I can see some credible discussion forums which contain negative feedback on one particular supplier also among the links. Although this is pretty good evidence to why our ranking has dropped there are some interesting questions: A) is there any way to rectify the 4000 or so black links, mass removal or other. (Doesn't sound feasible)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mannydog
B) some competitors who dominate organic ranking through better optimization don't seem to be affected or apparently affected as much as our site at least. Which questions how much we are affected as a direct result from this hack.
C) is there action or support for industrial espionage?
D) can you request from google to ignore the inbound links and would they not have a duty of care to do so? I'm fairly new to this ugly side of the Internet and would like to know how to approach recovery and moving forward. Thoughts ideas very welcome. Thanks in advance.0 -
Big Brands Still Paying For Links!
We have been spending a lot of time creating unique and relevant content that is helpful to users in order to garner natural links. However, I still see large companies getting paid links to their site. They still rank despite the paid links - many higher that before thanks to the increased brand/domain authority bias by Google. I have seen a number of blogs with posts that have dofollow links to sites like Amazon and Dirtdevil. Are small businesses just getting buried or am I being too cynical?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Reviewing a competitors links
Using Open Site Explorer I was reviewing a sites links. This site happens to appear at position 2 in Google for a key-term that I am targeting for one of my sites. Most, if not all of the links appear to be coming from some very questionable sources that have absolutely nothing to do with their sites content or business. Some of the page titles are : Free Music - Free Music Tampa Bay Florida Fishing Guide Free BDSM and Bondage Sex, BDSM XXX, Fetish Por... LAX Car Rental Reciprical Links Page - Add Your Link Casino More Links Is this practice going to end up hurting their site and catch up to them at some point? From what I have read, these are not the type of links that you want to be going after.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BrandonC-2698870 -
When to give up on a website with a Google penalty?
I recently had a Google 60 penalty hit my website. The main two issues were that I had a person helping me with SEO and they bought some links. The second issue is that I own about 90 URL's in the my vertical. I created about 60 one page sites for these keyword targeted domains. I then linked these sites to main site. Big mistake! I kept these URL's all on the same server as my main site. In October 2010 I noticed my site hits dropped dramatically. I started looking for the issue. I didn't know which issue caused the penalty. I fixed both issues in November 2010 and asked Google for reconsideration in early December 2010. I kept link building for my site by finding quality links.I was extremely honest with Google. I gave them all of the domains I own and I told them the name of the person that bought links for me and the websites where those links were placed. As of late February 2011 a Google search for my domain still showed up in approximately the 64th position. I recently asked Google again to lift the penalty. I basically told them that I fixed all of my issues that led to the penalty and let them know I have been waiting for almost 3 months. I told them I have put the past 2 years of my life into this website and begged them to forgive me. I also asked them to let me know if my site was never going to be forgiven? I got the typical canned response from the Google team. As of today the penalty is still in effect. I just want to know when you should give up on a site. I have spent about $20,000 on this site and about 2 years of hard work. I don't want to give up, but I don't want to keep putting my hard work and time into the site if it will never escape the dreaded Google penalty. Do you think I should continue to wait and if so how long? Anything else I can do to persuade Google to release me from this penalty hell? If I do abandon the site and start from scratch what steps should I take? Do I need a new server? What if any content can I take from my current site and transfer to the new site? If I can how do I do this without getting another penalty or lose the credit for the original content. I created about 2,000 pages of original content for this site. I'd love to be able to transfer this content if I have to start from scratch. Any ideas or detailed help plans would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tadden0