Paid links are paid for links that can
manipulate PageRank or be used for advertising.
On the one
hand, paid links are advertisements for your
business that are highly targeted to a specific audience. On the
other hand, paid links are considered a black
hat SEO technique, especially by Google. If a paid link
manipulates PageRank, it is viewed as a form of link farming
and your website will be penalised. The following
information is paraphrased from Google’s Webmaster Tools Help page:
Google, like most search engines, use links to determine a
website’s relevance and authority. A website’s ranking on
Google search results is based on many factors, including the
quality of websites that link to it. Link based
rating has greatly improved Google’s ability to return relevant
results in a search.
However, some Search Engine
Optimisers and webmasters engage in buying and selling
links that pass PageRank. Doing this is in violation of Google’s
Webmaster Guidelines. While not all paid links
violate these guidelines, links that are bought and sold for
advertising purposes should be marked with a rel=“nofollow”
tag.
The nofollow tag indicates that the link should not
influence the ranking in the search engine's index. Google
acknowledges that buying and selling links is part of the internet
economy and accepts that this is done for advertising. Google has
sophisticated algorithms that can detect link farming websites.
Link farming is the process where a large
website buys low quality and spam-filled links and then sells them
to other webmasters to use on their websites. This is frowned on by
large search engines and will be severely punished. A good example
of this is the penalisation of leading American department store JC
Penny by Google.
JC Penny had been found guilty of
using over 2 000 paid links to increase PageRank.
In order to penalise them, Google moved them down to the 5th page of
search results. This is just one example of how a website can be
penalised by search engines.