Does Guest Blogging Violate Google Policy on Paid Links?

So you know Google will penalize anyone found selling links that directly promote or try to pass PageRank to another site if it was sponsored or sold.  You are freely allowed to link to whatever you want as long as you aren’t paid to host or embed that link.

Google’s Policy on Paid Links:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

However, Google isn’t terribly unreasonable and clearly states on their Paid Links article in WebMaster Tools Support:

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow”attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

This basically means bloggers can accept sponsored links and programs from services like IZEA SocialSpark and do them without any worry of getting penalized by Google.  SocialSpark always uses nofollow links for all sponsors and you don’t have to worry about the passing PageRank risk.

This also means you can leverage a URL Shortener or other pass through service that isn’t indexed if you want to have click tracking metrics to show clients for example as well.

Let’s face it though, most advertisers who want to purchase links on your site do so because they are trying to get PageRank.  This technically puts all of the following programs Intellilinks, Backlinks.com, Teliad, BlogsVertise LinkVehicle, PayPerPost, ReviewMe, SponsoredReviews, LinkWorth, PayU2Blog and others in violation of Google’s link Terms of Service even though they all require disclaimers about sponsored links, they all require “do follow” links for their advertisers which is against the Terms of Service.

DragonBlogger.com paid the price for hosting some sponsored links back in 2011 when I was testing Teliad and Intellilinks and received a warning from Google via Web Master tools that my site was being penalized for hosting sponsored links.  They drained my PageRank from 4 to 0 and it never recovered even after several PageRank updates and my removal of many links and filing for a re-review.

If you choose to sell links to advertisers from your site and they are not going to be dofollow know what you are getting into.

Guest Blogging Against Google Terms of Service?

Many guest bloggers and guest blog posts are considered violation of Google Terms of Service as well.  If any of those guest bloggers were paid by clients to put those “author bio” links in their article then hosting this article is against Google terms of service and if your site is reported you could get penalized of your Google PageRank.

I actually make a habit of asking my guest posters and nearly all who reach out to my blog are doing so because clients pay them to host links on other sites.  Now, you think Google may never find out right, after all how could they know if you didn’t know?

The thing is once 1 site is flagged for an anchor text,keyword as being a sponsored link, Google can update their algorithm to search and penalize any other site on the web hosting the same matching pattern.  This means your site could get caught in the crossfire.

Think about this when hosting guest articles where people ask for “author bio” links, if they were paid you are in violation for hosting the article.  There is no way you could know, but you still are and your site PR could be penalized if those links are flagged on another site and then scanned and found on your own site.

What is your take on this?  Do you think this makes you at risk for hosting guest articles even if you accept them from My Blog Guest?

-Dragon Blogger