Link Selling Tip: How To Protect Your PageRank
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 6 of November , 2007 at 9:27 am
Do you sell links on your website? Is link selling one of the primary sources of revenue for your website? That’s OK. There’s nothing wrong with selling links. It’s not unethical or immoral. It’s a perfectly legitimate business practice. But it could cause you to lose PageRank, which will cause a decline in the value of your links.
Personally, I think you’re better off selling links for their traffic value than you are for their PageRank value. There are so many other ways of getting PageRank than selling links to pass on your PageRank really isn’t necessary. But getting targeted traffic - now that’s a different story.
If you have a high traffic website in a niche area then your links could be worth more than they’d ever be worth as PageRank transferrers. But if you do sell links and Google finds out, be prepared to see your PageRank go down - unless you do this one thing:
Include a “nofollow” attribute in all paid links. A “nofollow” tag tells the search engines not to crawl that link. By telling the search engines not to crawl specific links, you are essentially saying “Don’t transfer my PageRank to this website that I’m linking to.” If your paid links clients are buying links for the traffic instead of the PageRank, this shouldn’t matter to them. The way you add the “nofollow” attribute to your links is to add the phrase rel=”nofollow” inside the brackets where your a href tag creating the link exists. When you do this, you are protecting your own PageRank and the people interested in buying your links will buy them for the traffic. Everyone will be happy and everybody wins.
Category: Link Selling
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Comment by Tim White
Made Tuesday, 6 of November , 2007 at 12:37 pm
Hey Nick,
I read all your stuff and this post was one of the best. A great advanced tip!
I have seen others use a different technique. Something like this:
http://www.mydomain.com/redir/?http://www.yourdomain.com
What do you think?
-Tim
Comment by Nick Stamoulis
Made Wednesday, 7 of November , 2007 at 5:45 pm
Sorry Tim. I meant to respond to this earlier and it slipped my mind.
I don’t like link redirects. They’re controversial for a good reason. For one thing, they look funny and there’s no evidence that there is any SEO benefit. It’s really a technique that blackhat SEO types use to hide the real URL they are directing you to or to get around a Google rule. It is really much simpler to add the nofollow attribute. Besides, some people won’t click a link that looks like that.
Comment by Tim White
Made Wednesday, 7 of November , 2007 at 6:29 pm
Hey Nick,
As you know, by default WordPress does not add anything to a url for a blogroll and the links do not open in a new window. I’m curious as to your opinion on opening blogroll type links with the _blank tag.
I have mixed feelings about it since I (we) work so hard to get quality traffic to our blog and sometimes people forget to bookmark or subscribe prior to leaving. At the end of the day, I prefer just a straight link that does not contain anything except the url. It’s user friendly and less annoying for surfer.
What do you think?
Tim
Comment by Nick Stamoulis
Made Thursday, 8 of November , 2007 at 9:26 am
Tim, I agree. That can get annoying, especially if you have a lot of links in your blogroll. Some people like to check out a lot of those links at one time and having a new window open every time they click on could be a deterrent.
That said, if you are running a business blog where you want your traffic to go to your company website from the blog then you shouldn’t be linking out to other websites any way. Your blogroll links should point toward your website. In that case, I’d say use the target=”new” attribute because while you still want people to go to your company website you also want them to stay on your blog and they will likely only click one of those links. Once they get to your company website, if you have the navigation set up properly then they can get to the other pages more easily so the target=”_blank” isn’t as big a deal. However, you will notice that we have extensive blog rolls with partner and affiliate links on our blogs. This is to offset some of our operational costs…which at the end of the day is not a bad thing! :o)
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