I know buying and selling links on google is a megga no no and is considered black hat. Forums and such like sell links and allow sponsership for a fee. Is this considered black hat or not, will these forums etc get penalised?
In my opinion paid links and sponsored links are the same thing. Google probably doesn't like either one. Actual sponsorship is another story though. If you are supporting some type of organization or cause you sometimes get a link back from a sponsors page. I highly doubt Google would penalize for something like this. So to prevent any penalties perhaps you should also extend some type of offer to the forum members so that it is more of a sponsorship than a paid advertisement. You would want to mention that offer right with your link. I don't know if that would for sure prevent penalties, but I think it might help.
Well, Not all paid links violate Google's guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, for example: 1. The normal rel="nofollow" method 2. Rirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file If you still think that there's a paid linking site violating Google's guidelines; Then feel free to report it to google. Report paid links
Those paid links from a forums only last for a month so I don't think that Google will make a big deal out of that. I believe tha tthose blog post which are staying more than a month is what Google thinks to be black hat because it is affecting there algorithm.
google only knows that a you are buying links if the anchor linking back to you is the same... so i think you should change it up a bit..
Correct +1 reputation Thank you! People on this forum should go right to Google more often to see what they have to say rather than speculate. I mean that in the best possible way. Why keep guessing when they spell it out. See: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/information-about-buying-and-selling.html
it is this way.. only google want to ern money with links and doesn't want competitors. Thats why it hates paid links