Is it OK to Sell Links Using the NoFollow Attribute?

There are times when I get requests for sponsored posts in my blog. There are some companies who would like to feature one of their products and want to pay us a small fee for reviewing their product on our blog. Then there are also some sponsors who want to advertise in our site by using a small image in the sidebar, header or any other part of the template.

The one thing which concerns me regarding paid links or sponsored posts is how is Google and other search engines going to react if I start writing sponsored posts or sell paid links on my site? Will my search ranks go down or will selling paid links will have no effect on the search ranks of other pages of my website?

In the following video, Google Engineer Matt cutts explains the idea behind selling paid links and using the Nofollow attribute.

Matt suggests that selling text links is fine as long as you use the “Rel=Nofollow” attribute. Google does not care about the links that does not flow pagerank, so selling paid links using the Nofollow attribute is perfectly safe. It won’t affect the search ranks of other pages of your website or blog.

If a link within your site does not affect the pagerank of the destination website, Google and other search engines won’t flag your website as spam.

If you study the Adwords links in Google search result pages, you will see that all those links are Nofollowed and they do not affect pagerank in any way. In fact, this is true for other search engines as well – Yahoo, Ask, Bing and so on.

The bottom line is: If you are the owner of a website, you can do whatever in your blog or website, but make sure that paid links does not affect search engines.

Tip: Know Where Your Website Ranks in the Search Engine Result Pages