Selling Links

[DrayScherm]

A link-building company has offered to pay me $60 / month to post a link to a website that is related in subject. My website is for my web design business, and the purchased link would be to a web-hosting company or a website that compares web hosting companies.

A couple of questions that I'm hoping people can help with:

If I accept this offer is there some scenario in which it would hurt my search engine ranking (particularly, with Google)?

If I accept this offer is it important (or even relevant) to clearly mark the link as an advertisement?

I understand that it is a bad idea to link to "bad neighborhoods". How would I go about trying to find out whether or not the site I'm linking to is in a bad neighborhood?

Thanks....Duane

[usearchme]

Hi there

Ive done this in the past with a few of my sites, and it worked out ok, It didnt hurt myself I dont think lol !

Chances are it probably wouldnt affect your serps but it might, no one can tell you for sure !

That is why a lot of people dont risk doing this, but im sure a lot of people do sell links on their site after all its ur site if you wanna sell advertising then you can.

Google for instance doesnt have a problem with people selling advertising so u can lable it as advertising if you want to, it only has a problem with people trying to manipulate their search results, so sometimes recommends people add a no follow tag, many people dont !

The bad neighbourhood one is difficult to answer, I would just suggest u check out the site your going to link to clearly, if it has decent backlinks and content then i would think its ok, maybe someone else can help you more with this.

Hope this helps

Woc

[vivianrollins]

Use no follow if possible unless you want to check on their content often. If not and their site becomes adult/spammy your rank will decrease as you are endorsing that domain.

[MoneyTopList]

If Google recognize that you sell links it may hurt the website position in SERPs. However, it is difficult to recognize that unless you register your website in some popular marketplace which sells links.

[Risky_Fire]

Sounds good, even if your rankings were negatively affected you can always remove the link and your rankings should return.

[DrayScherm]

Thanks very much for your observations. Very helpful.

I've seen a number of references to selling links - how does selling links differ from advertising on a website? Is it simply that advertising is marked as an ad and the sold links are not (implying that they are a "neutral" endorsement of the website)?

Thanks again...Duane

[chenshuiyang]

That's a bad idea,if you not strong enough,don't sell links, if there are some "bad neighbor",then you website may infect too..

[masini]

Seling links is your dead end. Google will penalized you

[Andy Edwards]

I don't see anything wrong with selling text links. Just make sure you don't put too many links on a page.

[kgun]

Seling links is your dead end. Google will penalized you

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