Search Engine Optimisation
Whether you’re new to search engine optimisation or an experienced specialist, there is always a certain stigma around paid linking. It’s something that you either avoid like the plague for fear of being penalised and thus invalidating all the time and effort that you’ve spent on your SEO campaign or something that you shouldn’t shout about, but might want to use if you’ve got some spare cash and are after some quick and impressive results. In the wake of Matt Cutts claiming that Google have “taken action” and no longer trust links from a major newspaper over paid links, it might be worth siding with the former.
Obviously paid linking is against Google’s Terms of Service, but that doesn’t automatically mean that search engine optimisation specialists haven’t used it now and then in order to get some page one results, however they’ve always had to be a little bit sneaky about it. In light of this, it’s interesting that one of the country’s main newspaper sites openly offered links in exchange for money in their SEO Editorials section.
SEO
The initial penalty handed out to the Express Group (which also features the OK Magazine website) in the wake of the email which stated that links were available from £1000 was simply to penalise the page rank in Google’s toolbar, but Matt Cutts’ recent comments suggest that a second penalty has followed – Google simply no longer trusts the Express and assumedly the OK site and consequently passes on no page rank from these links, making them all but useless for SEO.
Whether or not Cutts is directly referring to the Express incident or another major UK newspaper group which has somehow managed to slip their paid linking offers and subsequent admonishment under the radar, it’s certainly a sharp reprimand for not applying the ‘nofollow’ attribute to a link which has been paid for. Whether you’re an experienced SEO technician or are new to the game, it’s certainly a sobering reminder to make sure that you stay inside the lines.
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