Paid Links - How does Google classify them?

[CFSSEO]

Greetings All,

I have a question regarding "Paid Links."

My company creates custom websites for other small businesses across the country.  We always have backlinks to our primary website from our "Dealer Sites."  Would Google and other search engines consider links from our "dealer sites" to be "paid links?"

Example:
http://www.atlanticautoinc.com/ is the "dealer site."

Would Google consider the links  from Atlantic Auto to be a "paid link," and therefor have less of an impact for page rankings, due to it not being organic?

Any insight on this matter would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you!!!

[vivekrathore]

Google penalizes when it sees that you are gaming seo or trying to fool google.

If you use "no follow" on your links, you are saying google that dont count the link juice therefore you are not claiming seo benefit from these links. NO harm done.

Google doesn't penalizes you for any no. of "no follow" because you are not fooling it. You have added it for your users, not for google. Many sites like "Pay pal" have their links below any site which uses its payment system, but as it has "no follow", google doesn't penalize them if also they have millions of such link backs.

relax and add "no follow" on these type of links. you will get benefit. for sure.

Hope this helps

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

Whilst I don't think you'd likely be penalised for this, we generally don't advise linking like this from footers due to how often footer linking was used as a spam technique in the past. The paid links Google is more concerned about are the links where hundreds of dollars are exchanged between unrelated parties for one party to post what looks like an editorial link to the other, with no disclosure that the link is basically an advertisement meant for the purpose of influencing search results.

A purist would likely say you should nofollow these links in order to remove any risk, so that is a good option if you are concerned. I don't believe you'd be likely to fall into a severe penalty or anything similar with these, but I would consider nofollowing based on these links being classic footer links.

[CFSSEO]

Thank you very much for the response!

Do you believe that Google is able to distinguish them as "Paid Links" due to the similar IP addresses?

If we're talking ten thousdand to twenty thousand links of this nature, is it true that having -THAT- many "nofollows" can also hurt us?  I read that Google looks at an over-abundance of "nofollow" links as a bad thing, as well...

Thank you for your input!

[vivekrathore]

Yes, Google may think those as paid links and may penalize. Best think to do. Use "no follow" on those back links you are getting. It will solve the problem. you will still get visitors from those links but no link juice thus no chance of paid link penalty.

[SoleGraphics]

Here's a really recent video of Matt Cutts explaining what's considered paid links.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zupIbMyMfBI