Forum Moderators: phranque
These will be text links to some well known and related companies.
However; I have recently read that selling links from your site doesn't look good to Search Engines such as Google. Is this something I am right to be concerned about? I know I could increase my income immediately by doing this but I don't want to affect the long term success of my site.
Any advice is much appreciated!
If for traffic only, then you should be able to rel="nofollow,noindex" the links and/or bury them in some javascript and I can't see why a SE would penalize you for selling pure advertising. This should withstand a human review.
If they are paying you in hopes of gaining not only traffic, but link equity... then I would be careful. I'm not sure the engines would even bother tracking down a site that sold 10 links, but I tend to error on the side of being conservative.
If I were going to sell links on my site, I would do it only to relevant sites and in such a way that it does not appear to be a sold link, more relavent content that references the other site. For instance, I would likely write an article about something relavent to my site and the other site, and include an inline link to their site with anchor text relavent to both sites. If I sold links to 10 different sites, I would likely have 10 articles - one for each link.
To be honest, I am not totally sure and have emailed asking if the ads would be for traffic only and not for PR. With regards to placing ads in articles, I agree, I'd love to be able to do this instead but this company has contacted me with just the option of placing text links on each page within my navigation bar.
