Google: Giving Charity & Donations In Exchange For A Link, Is A Paid Link

Dec 6, 2016 - 8:27 am 37 by

Google Spam Reporting

Google's John Mueller replied on Twitter about a story on Medium named Making Charity Donations in Exchange for Backlinks: Good SEO or Risky Strategy?. It references a list of charity sites that give dofollow links and shows how the links help build rankings and traffic.

John Mueller said, these are paid links. And according to Google's webmaster guidelines, buying links is a link scheme against Google's guidelines.

Here is John's tweet:

Honestly, I am shocked people need to be told that giving a donation in exchange for a link is also against Google's webmaster guidelines. I just don't get why SEOs convince themselves these are acceptable ways to get links?

Maybe it is because Google has sponsored Apache and got a link and even after I reported it, the link is still not nofollowed? Maybe? They did remove the Chrome paid link.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Google News

Google Won't Be Broken Up In Monopoly Case But Required To Share Search Data

Sep 2, 2025 - 5:50 pm
Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: September 2, 2025

Sep 2, 2025 - 10:00 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

September 2025 Google Webmaster Report

Sep 2, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Ads

New Google Ads Checkboxes To Filter Campaigns

Sep 2, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google Ads

Google Ads AI Max Not Designed To Go More Aggressively After SPN Inventory

Sep 2, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Search Google Maps For Location Assets

Sep 2, 2025 - 7:21 am
 
Previous Story: Google Does Try To Reach Out Directly To Webmasters In Trouble