Beware Paid Links and use the "no follow" attribute
I have started receiving the following type of emails recently, which offer to pay me between $10 and $50 to embed a link to specified external websites.
Hi Andy,
I was looking at your page on credit scores - 10 things to know about your credit - , and I'm interested in paying you $30 to place a text ad on with the possibility of a multi-ad deal for more money upon further review of your website and your interest. The ad will link to a site offering credit repair services.
I can pay you immediately via paypal or check once the ad has been posted. Please let me know if you are interested and I will send you the ad. Thanks!! :)
Best,
Judy
Generally the emails are for paid links to credit repair, loans or debt management type websites. When I first started blogging (on my other site), I used to jump at these opportunities for the easy money and they actually paid on time. However, I soon learnt the hard way what the real cost of these paid links were – a drop in your page rank and potentially in Google referrals to your site. This means less visitors and in the long term less revenue from my other sources. This far outweighed the few dollars I could get from the paid links.
I did some research on this topic and found that Google frowns on these “embedded” paid links, especially to blacklisted sites that use this method to inflate their page ranks. Page rank is mostly based on the number of unique links you have coming into your site. You can see more background and technical details for this in Wikipedia (link below). To keep Google happy (which generates the majority of most websites organic traffic) they suggest adding the “no follow” attribute to all outbound paid/ad links. All the search engines (Yahoo, MSN) also encourage use of this attribute. Here's how you easily implement this attribute in a standard HTML link : (I have changed the <> to [] brackets to prevent the example link becoming a real link when I publish the post)
[a href = "dummy_url.com" rel = "nofollow"] Dummy text [/a]
So, when I responded to these ad solicitation emails with the comment that I would be willing to put the text link into a relevant post, but with the “no follow” attribute – they were suddenly were no longer interested. No surprise there. Obviously they were not looking to leverage my site for real advertising, just looking to build their page rank. Also as this blog is still relatively new, I don’t expect to be in a position to attract “real” advertisers yet. On the flip side, I have used this situation to add to my blog goals (I do have them – but that is the topic of another post) an item that I will get an advertiser on my site, by year end, who wants to advertise due to the number of visitors I get and not just to build their page rank. Direct advertising is the most lucrative source of revenue, but you need to go about getting it in the right way.
April 24, 2008 9:47 PM
Hey I have been getting these emails too! I have already accepted a few of these though , what should I do?
Can I cancel these ads or add the no follow link know ?
April 25, 2008 3:58 PM
Joanne, thanks for stopping by. If you have already accepted and you want to cancel, you should refund them thier full payment and explain your reasons for canncelling (ie nonfollow issue). Don't ad the nofollow attribute without letting them know you are doing this because they will know this through link software they use.
Andy.
April 25, 2008 7:57 PM
Ahh I've received this email as well. I'm no stranger to advertising ( though I don't have any on this site yet ). However, I haven't replied yet. Having a couple non-nofollow links doesn't have to be the end of the world, as long as you don't go overboard. And of course, don't blab to google about what you're doing ;)
April 25, 2008 8:13 PM
@ Llama money. I agree some nofollow paid links are fine as long as they are not "black listed" by google for being unreptuable. The easist thing to do is to check the website you will be linking to for 2 main things -
1. What is their page rank? If they are above 4, they are most likely quite reputable.
2. Do a search for" [advertiser name] google black list" or words to that effect and if your search returns information suggesting that the advertiser is not legit than be wary about promoting their links.
Alternatively, I have seen some sites that state upfront they they are money making sites (a lot of MMO blogs fall in this category) and so they don't really care about page rank and the whole nofollow is a non-issue.
Thanks for your comment and I enjoyed reading your blog regularly.
April 26, 2008 8:55 AM
Andy, I think it's all about balancing risk. If a significant portion of your income is search related (aka Adsense) than yes this is something to consider. If search engine traffic is low portion of your blog income, than links ads like this can be a really good source of income.
The trick is to not agree to long term contracts. This allows you to react if your page rank does get reduced and you decide that is important to you.
There is a great deal of speculation about external page rank really relates to search engine hits. I know of a number of blogs with lower Page ranks than my blog that receive far more search engine hits.
Right now, these types of ads are more than 40% of my revenue, with adsense being less than 20%, so for me it doesn't make sense to remove them.
I also wonder how the big G can really tell what is a legit link vs. none. That would seem like a very tough thing to do, unless as you mention they are on a known black list.
I don't sell links to pay day loans, credit cards, or any other financial product I wouldn't use.
April 27, 2008 4:27 PM
@ Glblguy - Thanks for your comments. I do agree with you that paid links are a great source of income, I was just stressing that you should know where you are directing to...if it is a valid side that is not black listed by google, then go for it. I have had a bad experience with this in the past and am more wary now.
The Big G is able to pick these up quite easily through all its bots. Actually, there are 100's of programs avaialble online that can break down all your link details including all the related attributes.
The value of pagerank my be debatable from a search/referral perspective, but I know when I have a had a higher page rank (from my other blog) I was getting a lot more advertising requests. The difference was $30 when I had a PR of 0 vs $300+ when I had a PR of 3. So in my opnion, for direct advertising PR is very important. For search you are right, I only noticed a slight drop in referals.