Google’s John Mueller has recently reminded webmasters that getting a dofollow link by paying bloggers or acquiring links through these means is against their guidelines. Such topics are touched upon time and again by webmasters to know Google’s stance for such links.
The Question was asked by a webmaster
“If I dofollow backlinks due to paying bloggers to write highly relevant review articles or paying for high-quality PR news articles, are they paid links that go against Google’s guidelines”.
Mueller’s answer:
“So I feel like this question is asked a little bit pointed. And I guess the quick and easy answer is, yes, if you’re paying people to create content with links, then you’re paying people for those links. And if you’re paying for links, then that would be something that would be against our webmaster guidelines. So that’s kind of the easy answer there.”
“Of course, if you’re kind of– if these links do not pass PageRank, if they have the nofollow attached to it or rel=”sponsored” attached to it, then that can be fine. That’s essentially a way of advertising your website. It doesn’t pass any value to your website. But it still helps users to find your content and kind of indirectly helps to promote your content and your website. So maybe that helps a little bit.”
Mueller has made clear that paying a blogger to get a dofollow link is against their guidelines. However, if you want to promote your website, then getting nofollow or rel=”sponsored” backlink from a relevant blogger can help attract highly qualified traffic for your website. It may also help in increasing brand visibility among new categories of customers. So such activities can be carried out for promoting your website but not for acquiring links.
Few webmasters questioned Mueller in curiosity how Google would know that it is a paid link. Below are the few snapshots of the discussion on Twitter.
We’re not that new at this.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) January 18, 2021
This means google also reads our mails, they are not new to this
— satinder satsangi (@satinder1972) January 19, 2021
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2 thoughts on “Google: Acquiring Backlinks from Content By Paying Bloggers is Against Our Guidelines”
Excellent post ever. Educative and informative. Thanks for the article with a lot of different and meaningful conversations. It is very helpful in our day-to-day life.
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