When building up your website, it’s important to think about how you’re going to promote yourself. Online, this usually means creating and implementing an effective search engine optimization or SEO campaign. This can involve the use of keywords, linking, and targeted ads to increase your site’s page rank or where it rests in search engine rankings. However, if you abuse the best practices, you could wind up punishing your site and casting it to the back of the results.
One way people do this is to sell PageRank links. Selling pages that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s usage guidelines. This has been so for years yet the search engine still has to remind people of this fact on occasion.
If anybody approaches you and offers to pay for links on your site, don’t do it. The selling of links isn’t allowed and can cause your site to be heavily penalized by Google. Your site will be dropped down in the rankings and won’t be as highly trusted as it was in the past. This will also cause your PageRank to drop. You may even find your site showing up deeper in search results than it did previously.
You’ll likely be warned at first before serious action is taken, especially if this is your first offense. Still, why take the risk? You work hard on building up your site’s SEO, so why would you compromise that on a simple scheme? Your site is worth more than that so you should treat it as such.
If you do get caught selling PageRank links, you need to act quickly to remedy the situation. Your first task is to make sure any links that you pay for on your website don’t pass PageRank. Remove them or the pages they appear on to be safe. Another thing you can do if you really want to include paid links is to include the re=”nofollow” attribute on them. This can save you a lot of trouble. Once you’ve fixed the problem, you can send in a reconsideration request to Google to make sure the site is no longer in violation. From there, you’ll receive either approval or disapproval depending on if the fixes you made are deemed acceptable.
Google doesn’t joke around about this, so be mindful of selling PageRank links so you don’t lose your current status in the search results and damage all of the hard work you put into building up your SEO campaign.