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Friday, July 13, 2007

Don't buy links anymore.

The Internet's most hot topic of discussion today is John Chow and his blog that has fallen out of Google's ranking.

I don't know the what it means by this is what I could understand:
When you search for JohnChow or John Chow, his Google adword is not appearing at the right side of Google's search results.

Here is a blog post in Blogstorm that mentions about Google Webmaster Guidelines:
“Buying links in order to improve a sites ranking is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.”

Matt Cutt's has more on paid links but you get the general idea - Google doesn't like people buying and selling links.The paid links on the right hand side are totally unrelated to his content so stand out like a sore thumb.

My immediate concern was about the sponsors who are buying paid to blog posts.

“Yet another “pay-for-blogging” (PFB) business launched, this time by Text Link Brokers. It should be clear from Google’s stance on paid text links, but if you are blogging and being paid by services like Pay Per Post, ReviewMe, or SponsoredReviews, links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. The rel=”nofollow” attribute is one way, but there are numerous other ways to do paid links that won’t affect search engines, e.g. doing an internal redirect through a url that is forbidden from crawling by robots.txt.”

Now look at what Mashable says:

Most readers would disregard a sponsor post entirely, and could put the blogger and their reputation in jeopardy as a result.

I wrote to Vin of betabloggerfordummies and asked his opinion on two questions:

1. Is it still advisable to remove 'No Follow' tag?

2. Is it ok to join certain bloggers network like 'Blogging chicks network' and 'I follow' network.

His reply is given below:

“That article does not say anything about 'No follow' tag.
It is your blog and you can do anything you like in it except copyright and other violations.
As far as I know Google has nothing against no-follow. If you find anything let me know. You can join any network you like."

So, what do you make all of it bloggers?

Thank you Vin, Mashable, Matt Cutt and Blogstorm.

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