SEO Step By Step Guide– 138. Don’t Sell Links

If you have managed to get some decent ranking and good PR for your website, you might be tempted to make some money by the side by selling links. This is one of the temptations we often get; but do not give into that temptation because you might risk your own page rank and search engine position.

Among all the search engines, Google is very particular about selling links because this affects the reliability of their ranking algorithm. So to discourage this practice, Google penalizes the sites that sell links. So rather then eliciting the wrath of Google the master of the search industry, it is better not to make that little money. Once your site is marked for selling links, your website’s credibility will be lost. Your ranking in the search results pages of Google will drop drastically and your PR too will drop. Once your PR drops, then no one would like to buy links from your site. That is the idea behind penalizing websites that sell links.

So if your core business is not selling links, it is best not to venture in to that with your website. It might look like easy money but it is also an easy way to lose your current ranking and get penalized by Google. Losing your ranking in Google is like losing every thing. It is a very scary proposition even to think. If at all you want to provide visibility to other sites in your website, make use of the ‘no follow’ tag so that Google does not turn its wrath on your web pages.

Google has enough reason in treating this issue so seriously. Selling links makes fool of the entire Google’s ranking algorithm. Google’s ranking algorithm gives a major place for link popularity. But Google wants fair practice. It wants the link popularity of the site increase in a natural fashion. Other websites have to link to a page because they find some worthwhile information relating their services or products and not because they are paid to do so. When more people link to a page it shows that the page that is being linked has some useful information to share and hence it is an important site. Google also treats such sites as important sites by giving them better visibility in the search results.

This should also tell you automatically that by buying links from other websites your website would be associated with bad neighborhood. Google does not like to be manipulated. Today, there is no need for buying links, as there are plenty of other ways of getting permanent one way links. So rather than wasting your money on risks, spend time building links through approved methods.

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