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There has been a lot of debate recently on the role of nofollow links in paid posts. Since Google has started splatting down Pagerank of bloggers who were selling links on their pages, a lot has been said and done to avoid a repeat of these events: links removal, subtle ways of hiding the purpose of these links in a blog page with headings like ‘partners’ or ‘related links’ on sidebar and posts; or, conversely, a site wide disclosure of paid posting activity. It must be said, though, that these above mentioned methods don’t really work, or maybe they work until a certain degree of time: removing links will eventually get blog advertising sites and advertisers mad at bloggers for breaking their rules, and both disclosure and subtle headings are well known by Google nowadays, so that they’ll end up penalizing a blogger’s site rank instead of preserving it.

So, where is the compromise here?

Google has expressely said that it has nothing against paid links and blog advertising, but it is simply against a  manipulation of pagerank juice that is not natural and content-based. This because paid posts are often totally far from a blog’s main content: think of it as an adult TV ad inserted into a series of kid/toy related ads in between anime shows. Kind of inappropriate, wouldn’t be it? Well, this is exactly what happens with paid posts written on the wrong niche blog.

The problem with paid advertising is often constituted by advertisers, though, not just by inexpert bloggers. This happens because advertisers don’t take Google guidelines in sufficient consideration. Google doesn’t allow artificial manipulation of pagerank, and the only way for advertisers to buy links is by letting bloggers add a nofollow tag. Now, most advertisers won’t allow it because they are not looking for traffic and product wordspreading, but for PR juice. So you see, dear advertisers, the problem often begins with your choice of action.

With the hope of helping both advertisers and bloggers understand this issue and take action for it, I’m going to share a list of pros and cons of dofollow/nofollow choice. The current post will only focus on advertiser benefits; next entry will be dedicated to bloggers

Dofollow/Nofollow Pros & Cons

• Dofollow links might give you temporary PR juice, but when Google finds out (or someone finds out and reports you to Google), it will remove the post on which you placed the link from its index, thus making your link disappear too. This also results in a backlink drop. In the worst case, your website will be labeled as spam and your brand will loose its authority and trust.
• Nofollow links don’t pass PR, but they will pass a number of great benefits to your products and website:
  a) Yahoo! backlinks boost: the Yahoo! search engine is nearly as used as Google, and it has the benefit of indexing nofollow links too, giving them credit;
  b) preservation of site brand Pagerank: Google won’t consider you a source of spam links, thus your rank, authority and trustworthyness will stay intact;
  c) Alexa traffic boost: each nofollow link is still a link that web users can click to reach your page, and you know very well that each unique daily visit is a vote for Alexa traffic rank.

But of course, I realize that advertisers also look for Pagerank boost somehow too. The thing is – there are a number of ways for advertisers to get a healthy PR increase:

• Use social networks: customers love it when brands show a more friendly face by connecting to them directly through websites like MySpace or Facebook; users will get to know your product better through a more personal interation, thus increasing both sales and Pagerank, because satisfied customers will happily link back to your product page on their blogs. You may experiement this with Twitter too.
• Promote products through dofollow social bookmarking: this is the best way to get dofollow backlinks that are useful to potential customers; display social bookmark widgets on your products pages, and satisfied customers will bookmark them for you as well.
• You and your site staff may also comment on dofollow articles of informational websites: it’s another legit way to get dofollow backlinks.
• Last but not least, you may choose to offer free linkware downloads on your brand website: web users who will use your – say – free graphics or web templates will automatically link back to your website with dofollow. This option is most recommended for Internet/Webmaster related brand/resource sites.

  Finally, if you are looking for more product exposure and not just link building, you may consider paying for posts that contain no links at all, but only relevant keywords related to your brand, and brand name; this will improve your product exposure, because search engine spiders crawl entire text pages, not just links, and they will return results based on keywords.

  Well, I hope I explained everything clearly in this article Feedback is highly appreciated and it will be valuated for possible improvements of n0t.info. On my next entry I shall write down a list of nofollow SEO benefits for bloggers. Stay tuned!