There’s an interesting article today on SEOmoz about paid links…
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-quizzical-duality-of-paid-links
It’s interesting to think of this issue within an adult context. Our affiliate links are “paid links” which means if we don’t use nofollow on them, we’ll get penalized, and now it looks like Google is penalizing the site receiving the link as well.
The affiliate sites themselves can use nofollow or put them through an outbound link script that’s blocked by robots.txt, but I don’t know what the paysite is supposed to do to avoid the penalty… Exclude the affiliate URLs with robots.txt? But what if the affiliate code is just added to the end of the URL like it is with hosted blogs?
When I started the thread on the use of nofollow Basschick’s view that nofollow as a problem because they wanted their link trades to pass link juice is probably typical of a lot of webmasters. Yet, as the article points out yet again - there’s a good chance you won’t pass any link juice to anyone if you don’t use nofollow (or run it through a script blocked by robots.txt - like gaydemon.com does).
I’ve tried to keep my site pretty clean in relation to this stuff, but I really wish Google would give some sort of indication (say in Webmaster Tools) that penalties are in place so we can tighten things up as necessary.
Anyone else have thoughts on this?
