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Posted in How-To | ad space advertising backlinks Google nofollow paid links redirect webmaster guidelines
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Selling ads and selling links are seen very differently by Google, and probably also many of the other search engines. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines tell us how they would like webmasters to sell their advertising space. There are two ways to make your ad links conform with the guidelines.
nofollow
The simplest way to tell search engine crawlers that a link is paid, and should not be counted is to add the nofollow value to the link’s rel attribute. Google takes this as an indication that the link should not pass PageRank, and should not be used as a reason to index the targeted page. How other search engines treat nofollowed links varies.
Redirect
Another way to prevent the advertisements from passing link juice is to use a redirect from a folder that is disallowed in your robots.txt file. For example, crease a folder ‘redirect’, and in it a file index.php:
<?php
header("Location: ".$_GET['r'])
?>
This will cause the link yourdomain.com/redirect/?r=http://link.com to redirect to link.com - the advertiser’s site. Then you need to disallow the folder from your robots.txt file:
Disallow: /redirect
Now Google will not look where the link leads, because it honors the robot.txt exclusion.
by Sutocu | December 10, 2007 
Very good tip with the redirect. I knew about the nofollow attribute but hadn’t thought of redirecting ads so Google won’t come down on me. Thanks!
Some people don’t mine the do follow - I just manually get rid of the spammy ads/comments for like weird medicines and other strange products.
The Mommy Blogger
I’m not so sure about google honors the robots.txt. I’ve seen exceptions where it was actually crawling links within pages excluded by robots.txt, so the pages were not ever indexed, but the links were followed. You’ll be amassed what google will do to extend it’s realm.
That might be true, but using this method for your paid links is still according to Google Guidelines, so you will not be penalized for it.
google bots.. i wonder where they got them. Hehe.. they seems to be very good with crawling. by the way, thanks for the tip on redirecting. I’ve been trying to find that for days.
I think Google needs to mind their own business and let us do what we want with our own websites
the only problem with selling ads on my page is i don’t get enough visitors. i figured google would get pissed at me for wasting their time.
That was an interesting read. Had some points that i never knew about. Thanks for posting that up….
I think google deserves to be the biggest and most succesful search engine. They have always considered what people want from the net, and when everyone was posting a thousand ads on their search engines, they gave people uncluttered and fast loading search results.
Having said that, I think that google is becoming too big and it dictating too much to us. That sort of monopoly is unprecedented but I think having so much power can not be a healthy thing for the internet just as it is not a healthy thing when that sort of monopoly manifests itself in any sector of the economy.