The debate about paid links has been going on for a while now and seems like there is no halt in the ongoing debate. First of all what are paid links?



Paid links are when you pay for a like on someone’s website. This in its self is not a problem and the search engines have no problem with this as this is an advertisement and the internet is build of advertising. The problem arises when advertisers are solely paying for a link for the purpose of increasing there Pagerank.



This is a problem for the search engines as this tries to artificially increase the strength of your website. Google made the first defensive move against this tactic by introducing the nofollow rule. What this means is that if you are placing a link on a website and are paying for it this link should have a nofollow attribute placed on that link to inform the search engines that this is a paid link and is only used for traffic building. What the nofollow does is instruct the search engines not to follow this link hence the receiving website won’t receive any strength. The nofollow also can be used for other purposes within your own website to better distribute PageRank.



Yahoo still has to make a concrete decision on this matter as they at the time of writing this article ignoring the nofollow rule. They have however stated that they believe that paid links are of poorer quality for the user, which I agree with. These kinds of links aren’t a true vote for a site as they are only there for financial gain.



So if you choose to ignore to use the nofollow rule how do search engines determine what links are paid and what links are natural? Google will never tell you how they detect paid links as if they did you would be able to form a strategy to counter act their detection methods.



If you are looking for SEO experts who will never used paid link to get you rankings I would try these guys out. They can make your website design SEO friendly from the start.



In the last PagerRank update I saw many websites being penalised for using paid links including some big SEO companies. So if you want to avoid this just make sure you use the nofollow and when choosing a website to place your links on try to do it from a traffic building stand point and not an SEO one.