currently im marketing several sites that have a high quantity of visitors (mostly from adsense). The amount of money spent on the sites is high, around a 1000$ per day. Anyhow a series of links on the pages would likely cover the amount im making per month (making my boss happy). the idea would be to sell these links for traffic purposes, on a monthly basis. Each site yields around 12k uniques per month, from all over the world. A prerequisite would be nofollow on the links, would this hurt at all as far as SE's are concerned?
Hmm.. hurt who exactly? Unless you are linking to bad neighbourhoods then they wont hurt your sites. NOFOLLOW means just that - the SE's wont follow the link. Your sites wont pass any pagerank or other SE benefits to the linked sites. Fine if the links are for human traffic alone I suppose. NOFOLLOWS are going to be far more difficult to market to potential buyers I would think though.
I wouldn't fill my site with external links nofollow or otherwise. Selling links is one of the best ways to tell google not to trust your site.
Hey Michael, how goes it? My understanding is that Google will not follow rel="nofollow" links. This would mean that a nofollow link would not lead to Google indexing the target page. From http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050118-204728: Maybe this has changed?
Too much work and not enough play but otherwise great thanks! And you? In my experience Google can and often does follow and index any kind of recognisable URL, hyperlink, text, javascript, rel=nofollow or anything else. Put up a test page on a site with only one inbound (a rel=nofollow) and watch what happens - Michael
For me vice-versa - just back from 2 weeks vacation in Thailand Will stick up a test page sometime and see what happens. Rgds.
I agree! nofollow means spiders won't follow the link (pretty logical no?) No, this won't hurt you but you aren't helping the people who buy the links. If i buy links i want quality! Anyone doing these tactics isn't worth my money! Didier
I dont know but i should give you advice that if you are getting 12k uniques by spending $30000 a month on one site then you are wasting your money. I dont know if i get what you said or not but $1000 for advertising per day and you get only 12k uniques what kind of site is that if you dont mind sharing
How does google know if the links on your site were bought? Selling links also seems to be a popular business model. Is it really frowned upon by SEs?
If the site has lots of outbound links in the footer then these are unnatural links. Google doesn't care if any money changed hands or not. Whether google can spot all these links at the moment is debatable. What is 100% clear is the fact that they *want* to devalue all these links by punishing the sites that sell them and sooner or later they will do it.
what would be interesting is if they would devalue sites that have adsense units on them.. it would be quite impossible to find all purchased links, however some are obvious. Basically i would guess that if you can determine a link is purchased, its likely that google can as well. actually i wrote the wrong amount of uniques, i meant to say 27k uniques its an insurance site, the amount we make is per sale is high enough to justify the money spent. Overall i'm a more interested in whether nofollow links could in fact devalue your site. We're not going to sell adspace on the main page of a site getting this amount of viewers, at such a high cost. Has anybody actually done the test of pointing one nofollow link at a site, and seeing if it gets indexed?
It is very difficult for an in-bound link to hurt any site. Think of it more in terms of value links add - some links add no value while other links pass great value. It's a difficult experiment. Maybe Michael has done so. Google has many ways of finding a page and you would have to be careful to fully isolate the single link (i.e. make sure that there are no other links to that page). Michael have you tested this yourself?
I ran a quick test out of curiosity on a couple of new domains. I am now in the process of a proper experiment which will eliminate other possibilities. I will post the full results in a new thread when they are in. - Michael
Attended a seminar given by Google this week, and no index is OK with Google, except they said it doesn't always work. You should test it. Google had more confidence in robots.txt
In the Google-sponsored seminar I attended this week, Google said it looks upon purchased and sold links as an advertising business model. When purchasing links or when reciprocating links, Google recommended that the links be quality, otherwise they have little to no value.