The increasingly high-stakes competition for rankings provokes increasingly nervous responses from search engines, especially Google. As mentioned in a previous post, this ultimately means less safety for any site.
In an online world where the (supposedly) good guy is becoming more and more trigger-happy, there is a growing chance that you can hurt yourself unwittingly, compromising your site’s prospects without any deliberate malevolence.
Case in point (not suprisingly): paid links. Many times they differ from normal links only in their intent. Intent is hard to recognize for outsiders, be they humans or bots, so Google has no choice but to make assumptions that are bound to be inaccurate.
Now let’s see a couple of techniques that just became more dangerous to use because of this.
1. Cross-linking your online properties
Promoting one of your sites on a topically unrelated site of yours is virtually undistinguishable from a paid link. You may put a nofollow on that link, but why should you? It’s your site and you definitely vouch for it. It’s an editorial link: it points to something you endorse. Still, it can make you look like a spammer.
2. Having a “Link to us” page
Such pages usually suggest ways to link to the site, as well as offering banners with their code. Many people who like the site will find those codes convenient to use (after all, that’s the purpose of it). However, a bunch of such uniform links to your site will look suspicious, no matter how organic and non-paid they are.
3. Selling/buying banner ads the old way
Obviously, this is less of a problem for people reading SEO/SEM news. Most webmasters, however, may still buy and sell banner ads without giving a thought to nofollowing links behind them. But then, although they believe they’ve only traded banners, in Google’s view they’ve just traded paid links.
What’s common in the above listed three issues? They are all perfectly legitimate marketing, still they became risky to employ because an industry-leader could not sort out its problems on its own. Instead, it used its muscle to shift the responsibility. Now that’s a slippery slope.
Tags: banners, cross-linking, link to us, paid links
