I am running a small forum wherein we have categories called "Link Sales" & "Advertising". I know Google is against the paid links which are bought/sold for gaining PR so when Google will crawl my forum and see that I am having a page wherein the deal is going on, will Google take action against my forum? I mean will it give my forum any kind of Penalty? Should I stop the crawlers to crawl that specific section? Can this be a solution for this? Please guide me. Thanks
Yes Google is against paid links but buying links for traffic is still allowed normally say a no follow link wont harm you i suppose
at first dont worry. dp ( here ) has the same category -> Link Sales did google penalize dp. i didnt hear this. you could look every webmaster sites ( exp : my signature )
If you will sell links[without no follow tag] in your site, then that is not good. But if you are only allowing discussion, then I think[not sure] that it is ok. DP also have such section.
Google does not care if you advertise link selling but they do get P#@@ed if you sell them. Sites like your does give Google leads on who is selling them and I bet they say thanks...
Google normally shouldn't hit you upon this. But I suggest making the forum page related to link sales, hidden from search engine altogether with robots.txt attribute or nofollow meta tag. I also suggest experimenting some time for that forum in a different domain.
one option indicated by gooogle is to put nofollow at payed links. They are not against payed links, they are again payed links that mess with their ranking algorithms based on incoming links.
You do n't need to worry about this.. It won't affect you in anyway and it's not against Google's TOS... Even if you sell links there won't be a problem but if you overdo it ,it's a problem (having 25 links on a page) Paid links affect only those sites which has gained in Google's SE by buying links and not the sites that sell links.
You are absolutely right. If you sell pr links, don't forget to mark it "no follow" (to avoid being penalized) but if you do "no follow" the buyers won't buy your link.
If its not against the TOS I would restrict Google Bots and other search engines from reaching that page using your Robot.txt file. That way the links remain, but engines never see them. But make sure you're advertisers realize their links are NOFOLLOW essentially at that point.