Sponsored Links and Side Bar Links

[casionmark]

Hi -

Wonder if anyone has any experience with this - I see a few sites who rank well whose backlink profiles contain mostly Side Bar or Home Page 'Sponsored Links'. To me, these are obviously purchased links. Do people think these still carry weight? They appear to or these sites wouldn't rank.

Also, I've seen a few backlinks from very high authority Open Source project sites that are triggered by a donation - sometimes of £1k and upwards. Is this something Google allows?

Thanks,
Mark

[Teflon]

This is pretty intresting topic. Cause we have lots of SEO professionals saying that those links doesnt have value anymore. Maybe that doesnt happen in a night and they still have some value. But I am pretty sure that in future those links doesnt have that much effect and might even have negative effect on ranking. Would be great to hear what others think.

[wonderpunter]

if you ever get a manual review.. for sure it wouldnt help.. all depends on how much risk you want to take

[matthewt]

My insight is sponsored links do not get a penalty, as long as they are on decent web sites.

Also, maybe ads can help seo, when the ad site is really popular, 'cause they are likely to disallow spam ads, like a parasite. When you promote a good site, on a great site, you probably have an above average site. Is that too out of site, seeing this website foresight in hindsight?

[schegolev100]

Hello! I think all links work!

The main thing is to keep balance. Your link profile should not contain only one type of link. In addition, if the link from the sitebar is posted on a site with a similar theme, this is definitely a positive factor for Google.

[Naya]

Hi! I also see lots of websites with obviously "sponsored" posts ranking, in fact their is one site I see that has a post that is marked up as "Sponsored Article" in G's snippet! So, the site hosting the post is ranking, but not necessarily the site that is linked IN the post! Hope this clears things up! :/

[PROFRBcom]

Also, I've seen a few backlinks from very high authority Open Source project sites that are triggered by a donation - sometimes of £1k and upwards. Is this something Google allows?

Thanks,
Mark

I too have wondered about these types of links. I've seen a few before but man... seems like an expensive gamble. Maybe if I could find a project I truly believed in it would make it worthwhile to give it a shot and if it didn't work for SEO purposes at least the money wouldn't be totally pissed away.