Hidehisa Watch

Google Policy on Paid Links

You can read about Google’s policy here, here, here, and here.

Here’s my brief summary of the policy: Offering compensation for a text link ad is a normal part of the Web economy. However, doing so for the purpose of influencing PageRank, or your rankings, is against their guidelines.

It’s also well known that Google provides a way for users to report paid links that they see to Google. While according to a survey by Barry Schwartz, less than a third of SEOs report paid links, this is a relatively important source of data to Google on the topic.

Yahoo Policy on Paid Links

Here’s a summary of Yahoo’s policy on paid links, using an excerpt from my interview with Garg:

“If a paid link is not valuable to the users, we will not want to give it value. Our algorithms are being organized for detecting value to users. We feel most of the time that paid links are less valuable to users than organic links. But that’s not black and white, it is always a continuum. Yahoo continues to focus on the element of recognizing links that are valuable to users, building mechanisms in our algorithms that attenuate the signal and capture as much value from that link in context, rather than worrying about it being paid or unpaid.”