If you’ve been blogging for a while, you may be getting paid links inquiries from potential advertisers. One benefit of maintaining a blog for a long time is that others will pay you for advertising links.
It can be quite lucrative over time, as you can imagine.
Though Google frowns upon this practice in many respects and penalizes sites that manipulate search results in an unnatural manner. The way they (and Bing) do this is by analyzing links to determine the quality of a site and its relevance to a given keyword. Search results are less relevant and helpful to users if links are purchased and sold, according to Google.
In case you would like to sell links on your website, you can take a look at this website. LinkDeploy has incredible reviews.
Nevertheless, if you read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, you will find that not all paid links are against their guidelines. In fact, if links are bought/sold for advertising purposes and not to pass on PageRank and manipulate search results, then it’s totally okay.
If you’re getting inquiries about advertising links, there are 8 ways to sell links on your site without being penalized by Google.
Attribute the link with rel=”nofollow”
The code adds the link to your site while preventing your site from passing any “link juice” to the other site – basically it ensures the other site only receives traffic from this link rather than a PageRank boost. This suggestion comes directly from Google so you can be 100% sure that it’s okay.
Include a Robots.Txt File only on Intermediate Pages
Search engine spiders cannot crawl a page if robots.txt is present. Site owners typically want to have their pages crawled. Links can therefore be redirected to an intermediate page that includes this characteristic. The use of an intermediate page strips the link of any PageRank benefits and ensures the link is for traffic-only…this is another Google recommendation.
Avoid “link Farm” Schemes
Websites with the sole purpose of passing PageRank and linking to other sites are known as link farms. It is important to be careful that your site does not appear like one, even if you are not using one. Google dislikes link farms for obvious reasons. In order to avoid looking like you’re a link farm site, embed links within relevant content and avoid having them all in one place.
Negotiate Long-Term Link Sales
The consistent rotation of links is another red flag for the search engines, as it makes your site appear to be a link farm. Therefore, if you want to remain under the radar, you need to carefully select your paid links and keep them consistent as long as possible.
Don’t Advertise That you Sell Links
Usually, online advice like this isn’t heeded. You will receive a large number of requests from spammers and banned sites if you advertise you’re selling links. The money may be tempting, but be patient and wait for quality advertisers to approach you. This will give you better link partners and reduce your frustration.
Use HTML Links Only
Link buyers may use JavaScript or some other code to update or change the text and URL of a link at a later date. Stay with HTML links to avoid this problem.
Link to Only Relevant, High-Quality Sites
The first thing search engines look for is relevance between links and keywords. As a result, you should make sure the links you are using point to quality content. Search engines need to do this to deliver the most relevant content to their users, which is their ultimate goal. If you do this, they will reward you.
Be Selective on Who you Partner with for Links
Make sure you carefully evaluate sites before linking to them and ask yourself if you want your visitors to go there. Find out if the company has ever had any past penalties that may hurt your business if you partner with them by doing a site:yoursite.com search in Google.
A good rule of thumb when dealing with paid links is to only link to sites you would link to otherwise. This ensures that you are only selling links that are of use to your visitors. Selling links shouldn’t be your main source of income but they can provide a nice bonus.