What exactly is a paid backlink? If I bought a text link ad from a site, am I going to get punished for it? I'm quite confused, it kind of puts me of advertising my site. I would appreciate it if someone could fill me in. I couldn't find anything using the search.
paid backlinks are links that have been paid for. in other words, if you pay for a link, thats paid backlinks. google is coming down hard on paid links. you will not get penalized probably, its just that if google identifies your links to be a paid link, they will not give you credit for it and count it as a backlink. so your money is right down to the drain. its important to know where you are buying links from.
So, lets say you're selling ad space on your site, I request a small text link in your footer, if google spot this I wont get any credit for it? How would google know that I've paid for it?
Paid links are just that, you "paid" for a link to be displayed that the site wouldn't of placed other wise. They are doing this since technically you can manipulate Pagerank and search results doing this. Google probably has many different ways to detect them, we can only make educated guess how. When selling text links on your website Google requests you use the rel="nofollow" in your hyperlink, this prevents any value from being passed on. You should be glad they are doing this, it prevents people from "buying" their search engine positioning.
You pay for a link that would otherwise have not been put up. Since you are trying to manipulate by buying a '' vote'', it isn't considered ethical. Links are generally bought for traffic and/or PR. Google prefers the former, and asks that you put a nofollow.