The true value of paid links to SEO
Tim O’reilly recently wrote an article in his blog about paid links. Many people have commented about this article including Matt Cutts of Google. The gist of the article is how advertisers pay not only for the click throughs, but also for the Google Page Rank. I’ll leave aside the philosophical debate on if paid links are good or bad. The one thing that caught my attention was Matt’s comment about how Google does not trust certain sites when passing on link popularity. To quote Matt, ‘just because a site shows up for a “link:” command on Google does not mean that it passes PageRank, reputation, or anchortext’.Bottom line is that you have to be careful when buying links, why do you want a specific link? If it is for the potential click through or brand management in the field, go right a head. However, if the only reason for you buying that link is Page Rank and increased position in the search results, make sure you do your homework before paying for it.