Do you write paid editorials or advertorials?
Most bloggers do this.
Interestingly, lots of bloggers don’t know how to declare paid editorial links to avoid any penalty from Google.
For your information, Google takes paid editorial link seriously, when it passes link juice. And, to penalize the publisher, Google decreases the Page Rank. In other words, Google shows less trust for the websites publishing paid editorials (along with links) without declaring.
If you received payment for publishing an editorial with links for a website, without declaring to Google (Search Engines), then it’s same as selling links. Of course in a different way.
Checkout this recent incident: This renowned newspaper portal’s Page Rank dropped from 7 to 3, and they contacted Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web-spam team.
It was found out that the portal was involved in selling of links via paid editorials. In simple words – The newspaper portal was publishing paid editorials with “DoFollow” links, which pass link juice. Google had also received ‘spam reports’ against the website.
Is Paid Editorial Legitimate?
Writing paid editorial is not a spammy activity.
You can write paid editorials, in fact you should write paid editorials. Because, this is the birthright of a webmaster (bread and butter). But, the point is – Are you declaring it or not?
How to Declare Paid Editorial Links
You can use either of the below two methods:
1. Make your links in paid editorial “NoFollow”. In this way you are not passing any link juice and telling the search engines that, this is a paid editorial.
2. Use an intermediary page for the editorial, that is blocked by robots.txt.
Add you view on ‘Paid Editorials with Links’ in the comments below.
About Nandita B.
My name is Nandita B, and I’m a SEO practitioner and part-time blogger. My sheer passion for sharing knowledge a webmaster needs drove me to create “A Webmaster’s Magazine” called SEOHour.com
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Hi Nandita, I strongly agree with you on this. Giving a dofollow backlink to some un-trusted website can harm your blog. It is like polluting the blogosphere just for manipulating the serps and earning quick bucks.
ReadWriteWeb has quoted this in a beautiful way: “Blogging is a beautiful thing. The prospect of this young media being overrun with “pay for play” pseudo-shilling is not an attractive one to us.”
Nandita , nice post .
But i have a question : I’m not a SEO specialist , hence can you please explain me in lay man terms what do you mean by the following :
“The newspaper portal was publishing paid editorials with “DoFollow” links, which pass link juice”
I do not understand the terms ”DoFollow’ links and ‘Link Juice’ etc
Cheers,
Dinakaran
Same here, I have heard of a number of websites which pay you to post are you referring to them ? and what exactly does Do follow mean ?
thanks for this informative post. a really useful post.
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Will I be penalized for changing rel=”no follow” (Default for all comments) to rel=”do follow”? I want to reward quality comments.
Nice thinking Jackson, It is a nice idea to give a dofollow link to reward quality comments. But I believe from seo point of view it is not a good idea.
Giving a dofollow link to some site means that you have full trust on the site, and if later that site gets involved in any spamy activities or other black hat seo techniques then it is bound to affect your site too.
So, I personally think it is better to stay safe and avoid giving dofollow links to external sites.
@Nandita: As a seo practitioner I would defiantly want to hear your views on this.
Hi Greg,
I also agree with you. In recent times, lots of Comment-Spamming activities (Offered by Blog Commenting Services) are going on, including Guest blogging (By article spinning).
If you trust a website and want to give credit by giving a DoFollow link on article body, then it’s OK. But, making the entire Comment System DoFollow is not advisable.
No doubt, Google indexes blog comments, but the value of links from blog commenting is questionable these days.
Again, Google also gives less value to links from Guest blogging compared to links acquired naturally.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your valuable thoughts.
Well must say you have give something really beneficial because I have recently sold one link ad on my blog so I should take cre of getting penalized..
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Nice to hear that Google is now hammering down big boys as well.
Keep sharing the good work.
Regards,
Sure, this overlap with official Google guidelines and some of the videos on “Webmaster Help” channel. However I personally would not recommend to anybody to sell links.
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Thank you that was useful information for my query on links
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Hey Nandita, I must say this is a crystal clear explanation of some of the most important ideas of SEO. Personally , it’s editorial links are best for me. Blog comments are good for bulk , but we all know that the good quality content links will always win. Thanks for this knowledgeable post.
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