Banner ads - are they paid links?

[Hissingsid]

I notice a few of my competitors are using banners and mini banners often run of site on topic relevant sites.

In view of Google's push to penalise paid links what is the feeling about banner ads. Are they seen as paid links.

Best wishes

Sid

[ecmedia]

Yes, of course, unless they have a nofollow tag or are generated using a javascript.

[soxos]

There are many websites which advertise without using nofollow. Not for SEO, but purely because they are unware of the nofollow tag / unware of the benefits of link building & seo in general. I can see the baby getting chucked out the bath again with this paid links madness.

Ironically its the SEO's who will come out top, because we know about it - joe bloggs just thinks he is placing an advert, which unknowingly gets him penalised on google when some snitchy SEO reports him.

[Hissingsid]

Hi,

The folks at Google say that they very rarely penalise by hand, they say they use the spam reports to tweak their algo.

I was asking about banners simply to get opinions about whether Google is currently giving zero credit for them. I guess they would just need to look for links with images in them and ignore them but is that what is happening?

Thanks

Sid

[soxos]

No - not at all, image links do currently carry weight / PR

Why would google want to discredit image links? surely these are one of the most 'honest' forms of links on the internet (unless the alt text is spammed)