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PRESS RELEASE - Exeter, UK, 10 December 2007

Paid links and Netrank

How the recent Google zero tolerance policy on paid links effects your website.

This month Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye have published a post on the official Google Webmaster Central Blog which has caused a furore in the search industry.

'Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank' outlines Google's stance on the trade in paid links and chronologically catalogues the search engine's increasing emphasis on combating the influence of paid links on the algorithm, including openly inviting the reporting of paid links, back in April.

Netrank has never offered paid for plain text links to our clients but, in the past, we have used blogging services such as PayPerPost.com as a cost effective way of disseminating media alerts for clients. Since the October update, which was aimed at reducing the PageRank of sites which had been selling links for their PageRank benefit, it has been apparent that Google is moving towards a zero tolerance policy on any PageRank conveying links which could be considered as being 'paid for' in any way.

In light of this, we began phasing out our use of paid blogging and, earlier this year, stopped using PayPerPost services in order to concentrate more of our resources on our ongoing natural link building campaigns. We continually monitor the performance of our different link building strategies and, in the current climate, contextual advertisements with sensible contextual linking on prominent authoritative blogs represent an excellent return on investment. Exposing clients to algorithmic penalties, however undeserved, is not in line with our working practices and we took early steps to disassociate any Netrank clients from the paid link trade.

Our creative link building, digital PR and award winning Link to us campaigns continue to develop genuine, contextual, earned links from established, respectable sites as well as popular, respected and relevant blogs, resulting in an excellent increase in coverage and high numbers of associated organic back-links.

If you have any questions surrounding Google's recent announcement, paid links in general or anything else, please contact Eleanor Precious on 07875 091 487