I am asking, due to the fact I recently had this email from them, beginning as: Hello, you have placed the following links or ads on your website. We are asking you to please include a "nofollow" attribute to these links. We are asking this because paid links are against the Google webmaster guidelines, and we do not wish to put you or our clients at risk with Google and an email address for asking questions: linkaudit@webuildpages This is all, a result from my being offered a decent sum to make a few lines of select keywording link to a few certain URLs belong to a company advertising some basic products. I did notice the site these paid links were put on, now dropped it's page rank to ZERO . . . but I was approached to accept this certain sum of money and a few months later, I get this "request" from http://www.webuildpages.com and wonder what any others out there would now do? Feedback appreciated!
This is a super interesting story..I am a little confused, maybe its just morning time. Who (if you want to say) approached with paying..WBP? You just gave them another do-follow link above.
Hi Pablo...no, WBP is not the payer of the links. They seem to be a "watchdog" or a place "monitoring" web sites for whatever reason. And I was wondering what gives them the authority to contact those lowly web designers who are struggling along with this technique or that, and tell us what we should do. The links that WBP refers to, are text hyperlinks of actual keywords within a certain site I own, which another company paid me (not a big sum, but fair money) to put on a few certain pages, so I did it and was paid. Those were to last for one year. Now, a few months go by and I get this "threat" from WBP so am wondering if other web designers and site owners know about this, or have experiences like this with similar difficulties? Thanks for looking through.....
Maybe WBP got this company as a client and is now in charge of their link building and trying to "restructure" their links. We all know Google does penalize paid links...thats a known fact. I dont see any "threats" on what they wrote you unless you left something out. I dont know what Id do...have you replied?
No, haven't replied yet Pablo. I mean, I got paid a certain amount and agreed with this company to put those paid links on my certain web site...now WBP steps in, so really am not sure what I need to do. Or even go???
i dont even know that id get into all that...id leave it alone or maybe even ask for a reason and explain your situation to them. they are an agency so you shouldnt fear any emails, etc from them.
Hi, this is Patrick Sexton from We Build Pages. We offer as a service a link audit. To learn more about this, please see our paid link audit page - http://www.webuildpages.com/paid-link-audit.html I added the url to this page to the emails. Thanks for catching that. Pat
I received the exact same email. Looks fishy. I accidently found it in my junk (spam) folder yesterday. I'm going to ignore it. If this was a legitimate company the email would look more professional. Also, it's signed wpb. Just like that in small case letters -- nothing else. Not exactly a trustworthy signature. Too fishy.
I too received one of these emails today, which sound distinctly spammy to me, but I can't see what they hope to achieve. I don't understand what nofollow actually does. Also, nobody but me knows that I have two or three paid links on my non-commercial site, which would only be of interest to my family, friends or people who share my interests. The only person who knows about the paid links is the person who paid me for them. I display Google ads, and I'm not aware of any infringement on my part.
A couple of things I have discovered: http://www.savingtoinvest.com/2008/04/beware-paid-links-and-use-no-follow.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Nofollow_(archive) I still don't understand it all. I have forwarded the above email (see my earlier post) to the people who paid for the link to see if they can comment. A friend suggested that it might be someone trying to kill links to a competitor, but I don't see how anyone could know which links on my site are paid for, unless someone was able to trawl the net looking for certain possibly frequently-occurring links.
AL H 5 and Martnal . . . I am glad to hear I wasn't the only one who received that email. Personally, I did not alter my links like WBP "requested" me to. I mean, it's MY site and MY money pays for the hosting of that site so it should be only ME who decides how the code on THAT SITE should work. Who made WBP the cops of the internet? Or for that matter, god? Pablo said to let this slide, so maybe I'll just ignore things.
You made a business deal with the first entity. Now you have to honor it. The other company has no business involving themselves in it.
I agree with Lexiseek. People paid me for links, I'm not going to change anything, but how did these people identify 6 paid links out of the hundreds of pages on my site? I searched for one of the links and only found three other sites with the same link. Google ranking, even Google indexing, isn't important to me, as my audience already know about my site. i'm not looking for customers, and I only added Google ads for the experience.