Text Links on Newspapers

Valuable?

[lpiracing]

I've been looking at a few small town online newspapers for link building for our e-commerce automotive site. Down the right side of the column they provide 3-5 text links for a fee. All the pages appear to be high quality sites, but a link on one paper will produce hundreds, if not thousands, of links since the links get copied on each page of the paper.

Questions

1. How would Google handle quickly getting a lot of links from the same site?

2. Would this be considered a paid link or advertising?

[martinibuster]

It's Google's preference for text links to be nofollowed. If someone filed a spam report on them them and your site came under a hand check then it's possible those links would be devalued.

Most newspapers run their links via JS or a redirect. Check the code to see if that might be happening.

[Rugles]

It was a sad day when newspaper companies realized they were passing out pagerank and it was a valuable commodity. Then they started with the nofollow and js redirects etc. Giving themselves a boost in ranking and denying people like me an easy way to rank high.

[JS_Harris]

Sit down and figure out where you might find people interested in your service, that's where you want your links! (and that's where Google will want to find them too)