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Originally Posted by NealRM
This needs to be clarified a little. Google went after paid advertising that passed SEO juice. Google does not have any issue with selling or buying advertisements that follow its guild lines. So ads are back to were they should be, as a means of informing others about your product or moving traffic to your site.
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Right now Google seems to be concentrating its paid link attacks on a select set of web sites. For example, I have not seen any newspaper sites or big name, mainstream sites get hit with the paid link penalty. I may be wrong about that - I really have not paid attention to all the sites that have been penalized.
Most sites that have been penalized seem to have to do something with SEO, especially directory sites. I guess you could say that if a site sells links and has a high toolbar PR, that site is a candidate for a penalty. More than likely the site achieved its high PR by trying to game the system to get its inbound links.
With that being said, I run dozens of local and regional portal web sites that rely on advertising as their source of income. This isn't penny ante stuff, either. We're talking over $500k in annual revenues (and growing). We never, ever ask for our advertisers to provide links back to our sites. But we're still taking precautions by adding the rel=nofollow tag to the ads on our sites.
As long as Google is very specific in who they target and penalize, I have no problems with that. But if Google makes this a mainstream event and starts penalizing most sites that have paid advertising, then we'll all know it's a conspiracy to drive people to Adsense.
Frankly, it sucks that Google can dictate how we treat or reward our advertisers by penalizing our sites on a whim. But right now there is no other choice than to play Google's game. I know that Google is trying to weed out the bad apples. Let's hope they remain careful in their approach.
If you have paid ads on your site, use the rel=nofollow tag on those ads. If you buy advertising in hopes of getting a PR or rankings boost, you're wasting your time. You need another link strategy.