Paid/Selling Links that Passes PageRank and How to Solve the Problem

You may not be aware that your blog may be considered as having paid links/selling links until when one day you wake up and find out that your blog PR has dropped from 3 to 0. For new bloggers who may not be aware of what is considered paid link. This post is meant to educate you on paid links and what you need to do to avoid falling in such a trap.

What is Paid Links

Paid links are simply type of  links coming from your website going to another website (outbound links). The can be in form of anchor text or  text links. In most cases, most bloggers have those types of links since it is usually a normal part of advertising but when is the paid links considered bad for search engine. Paid links from the website that do not have a rel=”nofollow” attribute.

These links negatively affect the search engine results since every time your page is crawled, the spider follow all links in your website. If the page that you have linked to does not have any relation with the information found in your blog, the search engine will not be able to come up with the right query for the content in your blog which will affect the overall performance of the search engines and is ground of penalization.

How to use a rel=”nofollow” attribute

The rel=”nofollow” attribute is a way of informing the spider not to follow the  outbound links that are found in your website.

All links usually have a HTML code which looks something like this;

<a href ="http://blog tips.xml.com">Tips</a>

To make this link as no follow; I am going to add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to the HTML code.

<a  rel="nofollow" href ="http://blog tips.xml.com">Tips</a>

This way the search engine will not follow the link. You can add a no index tag but it is not really necessary since it all the same.

To add no index tag, include rel=”noindex”. Your HTML code will be:

<a rel="noindex" rel="nofollow" href ="http://blog tips.xml.com">Tips</a>

For bloggers using the Blogspot, you can be able to find the HTML code by selecting the post that you want to edit and then selecting Edit HTML.

With the rel attribute, your blog will be safe from penalization and the page rank will not be affected in any way.