John Mueller of Google was asked the following question, "if I dofollow backlinks due to paying bloggers to write highly relevant review articles or paying for high-quality PR news articles, are they paid links that go against Google's guidelines?" John responded that the short answer is yes, it is against Google's guidelines.
This was asked at the 48:28 mark into the video from this past Friday.
Question: If I dofollow backlinks due to paying bloggers to write highly relevant review articles or paying for high-quality PR news articles, are they paid links that go against Google's guidelines?
Answer from John Mueller of Google: So I feel like this question is asked a little bit pointed. And I guess the quick and easy answer is, yes, if you're paying people to create content with links, then you're paying people for those links. And if you're paying for links, then that would be something that would be against our webmaster guidelines. So that's kind of the easy answer there.
Of course, if you're kind of-- if these links do not pass PageRank, if they have the nofollow attached to it or rel="sponsored" attached to it, then that can be fine. That's essentially a way of advertising your website. It doesn't pass any value to your website. But it still helps users to find your content and kind of indirectly helps to promote your content and your website. So maybe that helps a little bit.
Here is the video embed so you can listen to the Q&A yourself:
A lot of folks are now asking how does Google know:
We're not that new at this.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) January 18, 2021
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
