There’s a debate going on about selling text links and the use of the rel=”No Follow” attribute. I have to admit that I was oblivious to this issue until reading this article. Apparently Google frowns on selling links because it hampers the usefulness of search results. Google has taken steps to combat this with their algorithms. The end results is that the selling site isn’t penalized from a search perspective, but they lose the abiliity to pass on their page ranks.
Now Google doesn’t discourage advertising. But it doesn’t want people to sell the equivalent of popularity. The preferred method is to use rel=no follow in your link, which prevents the search engines from following the link when they crawl the site.
When it comes to sports blogs, many sites sell sponsored links and it proves to be one of the best sources of income. These can be for anything, but the most common are for tickets. In fact, I just sold one such ad on this site. I don’t know because I’ve never asked, but I’d imagine that many of these sites are willing to pay for ad space more for the link popularity than the click though. Even with this in mind, I didn’t know that might site could be punished. While I knew about the “no follow” I never thought to apply it, and it’s never come up in negotiations. A survey of a handful of sites reveals that not many are using “no follow.”
My questions to you are:
1. Has the use of “no follow” ever been an issue in negotiations?
and
2. Given the information in this post, are you more likely to use it in the future?
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