In a recent video, someone asked John Mueller of Google regarding the payments being made to bloggers for a do-follow link is against Google’s guidelines? The answer from John Mueller was quite shocking. No one has expected this answer. In short, the answer was “Yes“.
Recommendation:
If I do-follow 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?
Answer From Google’s John Mueller
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.
According to him, if these links do not pass a PageRank that means they are no-follow then they are fine. If not no-follow then a link must be attached with rel=”Sponsored”, in this case as well it is not violating any of Google’s guidelines. This is also considered as an advertisement for your website and to your content but in an indirect manner.
YouTube Video
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