New Issues for Linking

Linking as we all know is a way in which to get better page ranking within all the search engines.

In late 2007 Google put into place, rather abruptly, the smack down on paid links, stating that sure you can have paid links if you:

1. Redirect through URL blocked by robots.txt
2. Redirect through URL using 302
3. Use JavaScript to direct the link
4. Apply rel="nofollow" attribute to the link
5. Add to the page header
   

As you can see, this pretty much eliminates any benefit of buying linking.

For the newbie's benefit - the paid link crackdown in 2007 was just that. Website and blogs suddenly found their page rank lowered dramatically, or no rank at all.

That being said, it looks like a new service is in town, with an offer of paid links that is causing a debate between webmasters and the search engines. Check out the details of the debate with my article on Linking Issues 2008