Paid Links - bad or worth it??

Hi

I've recently been approached by other webmasters who would like to buy a link on my site. I would only be interested in linking with other well related sites but I'm concerned that accepting paid links will damage my rankings. I'm not to bothered about pr, so i'm not taking that into consideration.

Also can some one tell my the advantages / disadvantages to side wide links as this is what every one seems to be asking for, I'm interested on how it will affect the website.

Any help will be appriecated.

Kerrie

 

In the recent times, when search engines know to correctly detect paid links 80% of the time, the safest bet is not in site-wide links, but in ones embeded inside text.

 

sometimes it is usefull

 

We should email Matt Cutts. He would be glad to know that

 

If they are related to your websites content then good

 

As far as they are related to your site theme there is no problem.

To be on safe side,so that google does not punish you.

You must put nofollow attribute to all the paid links in your site.

 

Great idea. And negate the benefit from having the links there. Good way to keep your customer

 

Most of the customers are interested in DoFollow links only...
People tend not to buy NoFollow links most of the time

 

Beware of google which is against link buying and selling. People buy links mainly for PR.

 

People buy links mainly for SERP in my opinion

 

if you are selling links,

-sell only to related sites.
-as far as possible don't give site-wide links.
-don't sell too many links....different people will give a different number, but I wouldn't sell more than 5 links from the homepage.
-sell links only to quality sites and avoid spammy anchor text.

Make your links look like natural links and most probably you will get away with it.

 

Agree and like someone said, try to put the link with some even brief text.. something like: Our partner <link here> is now doing this and that...

 

so true, that's why most of them want to have their targeted keywords as their anchor texts.

As for sitewide links, I think Google still have no idea how to fight it because I'm still seeing lots of websites rank very well in competitive keywords with paid links (sitewide!)

 

More related incoming links mean higher PR, which (supposabely, but not always, there are situations where sites rank high in serps but have PR0 due to various reasons) means higher SE rankings for the particular linked keyword (anchor).

IMO anyway...

 

Site-wides are a waste of time as far as anchor text and SERPS go.

Hint : Google only counts 1 link to 1 page, per domain

 

I paid the price. google fell out with me big time when I decided to buy some links for two of my sites. I thought I was just buying some add's But G looked upon them as cheating.

 

If paid links are seen as bad by google, then why do people buy them? Surely there must be some benefit otherwise there wouldn't be a market for paid links and clearly there is.

 

google hate selling links.

but who will tell G the links r paid???? its my question

If u really want to sell links then u should sold links only those webmasters whom site is not MFA or realtes ur niche. No porn or adult, gambling contents.

 

Can be good if they're targeted to your site, high quality, popular, have lots of traffic and high count of inbound links that are quality, popular, etc as well.

 

One of my competitors has one of the most competitive keyword phrase on about 6 sitewide sites, usually footers of sites/blogs/forums with thousands of indexed pages. Yet they remain #1 ranked for the term. So I get the impression that as long as it's slowly built over a long period of time and it's from related sites, it's too hard to detect as paid linkage/ serp manipulation.