In my earlier post “to buy link or not to buy links” I had mentioned that there is way to let the search engines know if a link is a paid link/advertisement and therefore should not be considered for ranking websites and for Page Rank (PR) juice flow.

You must do some serious research before deciding to buy paid links as a method of advertising. Make sure that the site has a lot of traffic and gets visitors who are likely to be your customers. If you advertise in a non-relevant site, you will end up throwing money down the drain. You may get some visitors but they won’t become your customers.

Buy links to advertise your site in another site only when you have done some SEO and tried pay per click methods such as Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.

However if you have decided to buy links to your site you must link using the nofollow attribute.

Suppose your site is www.yoursite.com and the anchor text you want to use is “Buy SEO Tools”.

Here is how you must write the HTML HREF (linking) Tag:

<a href=’http://www.yoursite.com’ rel=’nofollow’>Buy SEO Tools</a>

Note rel=’nofollow’ – this attribute of the HREF tag tells the search engines:

“This is a link to www.yoursite.com but please DO NOT consider this link while ranking the target site in your search results or for Page Rank vote.”

The major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Live do understand this HTML tag.

You must be thinking – why should I use this anyway as it will block my page rank flow and affect my site’s ranking?

The problem is if you don’t use rel=nofollow the search engines will consider this as a normal link and page rank will flow and your rankings might improve. But in the near future if they find that your site does not offer good value to its visitors and you have bought links to spam results – just to get up the ladder of the SERPs (search engine results page), they might ban your site.

Why the search engines felt the need for rel=nofollow?

There are many wealthy online marketers in the world. They have plenty of money to do whatever they want. Imagine if they all made rubbish sites and bought links on high PR sites just to get better rankings?

The top results will be full of junk sites of these wealthy businessmen and soon people will lose faith in the search engine and look elsewhere. This is what the search engines don’t want. They want to show the best possible results to their searchers so that they can retain them for long.

Another problem was that many link spammers used to write junk comments in blogs (a.k.a comment spam) and leave a link to the site they were promoting. This became a problem for the bloggers and the search engines.

The bloggers spent most of their time in clearing comment spams instead of concentrating on improving their blogs. The search engine results were getting spammed too.

Here is the official bog posting of Google explaining how they have decided to prevent comment spam with the help of rel=nofollow tag.

Most of the blogging software automatically include the “nofollow” attribute in a comment. This is the reason why comment spammers have almost stopped wasting their time commenting in blogs for Page Rank.

Unfortunately this practice is still going on, though comment spam has reduced. I feel those who still do it are the ones who do not know about the “nofollow” attribute.

My blog also receives comment spam occasionally.

NOTE: Some of the blog software add rel=’external nofollow’. This is same as rel=’nofollow’, except that it means the site being linked is an external site. However rel=’nofollow’ is good enough.

What do you think? Is this a right move by the search engines?

Recommended Reading:
 
1. The official Google Blog on preventing comment spam
2. WebMasterWorld discussion on rel=nofollow attribute
3. Wikipedia explains spam in blogs
4. What is a blog