8 strategies to "safely" sell links on your Web site!

• I know Google doesn't like the selling of links but we REALLY need the money and have some great traffic and advertising options. We get a ton of interest from potential advertisers but don't want to trigger a possible penalty. What tips can you give me to minimize our potential for a Google slap?

As you've pointed out, Google frowns upon paid links because they unnaturally manipulate the search engine results. Specifically, both Google and Bing use links-based analysis in order to determine the quality of a site and its relevance to the keyword in question. In Google's opinion, buying and selling links circumvents this process, making their results less relevant and helpful.

However, according to the Google Webmaster guidelines, not all paid links violate their guidelines. If the links are purchased for advertising, and not for passing on PageRank and manipulating search results, the process is totally fine. If you're already getting inquiries about buying links from your Web site, there are safe ways to sell links without experiencing a "slap" from Google.

These 8 recommended best practices to selling links on your Web site are as follows:

• 1. Add a rel="nofollow" attribute to the link. This will add the link to your Web site, but will prevent your site from passing any "link juice" to the other site. This suggestion is directly from Google, so you can be sure that implementing this step won't hurt your rankings. Adding a nofollow attribute to the links will ensure that the other site is receiving only traffic and not a PageRank boost.
  
  
• 2. Redirect the links to an intermediate page that has a