Does your website have paid links on it? Or have you paid for placing links on other top ranked websites, and you think the recent drop in your PR could be attributed to these paid links? If your answer is YES, let's waste no more time in taking a good look at what is happening with your paid links? Paid links works wonders, provided it is used in the way it is supposed to be used. It should not appear to Google as systematic spamming.

To those who don't know what paid links does, here is a brief intro. Paid links serve basically two purposes. It increases web traffic to your website - provided the link(s) is placed in a higher ranked portal - and in the process, it also helps increase it's Page Rank. Now, there lies the catch. Search engines such as Google have no problem whatsoever with people placing paid links in their/other websites. But, their opposition is to the fact that having paid links in the site(s) could influence its PR as well, if not directly. Incidentally, there are webmasters out there who deliberately use paid links to enhance their website's PR, something Google looks down upon not so kindly.

In fact, Google themselves have proposed a way out of this conundrum, without hurting either party. That is, in order to avoid Google's punishing methods for deliberate spamming, they suggested that those who wish to use paid links to draw more netizens to their websites may put a 'nofollow' attribute in the said link so that the search engine spider could deduce that it is a link for building web traffic (and hence not to follow it while indexing), and has no relation whatsoever with page relevance or Page Rank.

Websites which had not bothered to heed the Google advice have already paid heavily for their misadventures. For the high ranked, high traffic sites, Google's tap on the knuckles till now had been relatively soft. There weren't any outright banning of such sites. Google doesn't want to compromise on their marketing interests in terms of ads in one stroke. Hence they were only demoted in PR. But similar soft stance can't be expected for smaller websites; in fact, they have banned some of them from appearing in SRPs.

It is true that for Google, it is practically impossible to catch hold of every bit of spamming happening in the portals of the cyberspace. But, as mentioned above, if Google ever catches hold of such misadventures, such sites will be promptly penalized. So let your portal never suffer the same fate due to any sort of link building carelessness from your own part.

To Your Success!