: SEO drawbacks of having paid links without nofollow? I've just signed up to text-link-ads.com, which doesn't appear to use rel="nofollow" on the links. After reading a couple of sources it appears

@Ann8826881

From Google Webmaster Central - Paid Links


Buying or selling links that pass
PageRank [ie. that don't include
rel="nofollow"*] is in violation of
Google's Webmaster Guidelines and can
negatively impact a site's ranking in
search results.


* Note that using rel="nofollow" isn't the only way to prevent PageRank from being passed, as mentioned further down that linked article.

See also Google Webmaster Central - About rel="nofollow"

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@Mendez628

Google, as the most dominant search engine, has the power to kill most on-line businesses - and they have used this power before - so, when you think about doing something Google doesn't like you have to think about the risk on getting caught and see if you can tolerate that risk.

With an ad network the risk of getting caught is very high, there is standard code you have to add to your page to show the ads and it's trivial for Google to detect it.

So, it's just a matter of time until Google decides to penalize this network and when they do you will go down with the network - not a good deal in my opinion.

I myself would never do something Google doesn't like because I'll probably take a serious financial hit if Google penalizes my site.

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@Sarah324

Yes, there are penalties. It's best to probably avoid that ad network if you can help it as you would lose the ability to pass PR which includes your internal pages.

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