this week’s ask SEO The question came from Kanusan in the UK.
“Can you offer a reward (such as a discount) when people share on social media such as Facebook or Twitter to get backlinks to your site?”
A few years ago, a friend from high school contacted me out of the blue.
He was the marketing director for a fairly large consumer goods company that sold primarily online.
His company was in trouble.
They lost virtually all of their organic listings.
They relied on those lists.
If they can’t get them back, they’ll soon be forced into some pretty massive layoffs.
After some digging, I found that the webmaster console has a rather severe manual penalty.
Simply put, they sent an offer to every customer and offered a discount if the customer provided a link to the company on their blog or other personal website.
Later it turns out that one of their customers is a Google search engineer.
That story ended happily, unlike many others.
We reached out to our contacts at Google and were able to remove the manual penalty fairly quickly.
The company was even more successful and never violated Google’s link buying policy again.
Google’s Link Buying Policy: Sometimes it’s as clear as mud
Over the years, there has been considerable debate about what Google actually considers a “purchased” link.
In short, any goods or services exchanged for links are considered purchased links and violate Google’s rules for link buying.
Purchased links can result in penalties for your website.
But there are definitely gray areas.
For example, if you offer a scholarship and a university links to you, is it a paid link?
What about a list of charitable donors on the site with links?
For years, SEO experts have speculated about what Google thinks about certain tactics.
SEO experts have justified their link building tactics, and most of the time they’re told by Google. It is against the rules to exchange anything in exchange for a link.
Link classification
Google recognizes that in some cases it may be appropriate to exchange links for money or other goods.
In the not-too-distant past, the only way to do this without breaking the rules was to tell Google not to follow links where such exchanges took place.
Using the “nofollow” attribute has become commonplace for people to link to valuable sites in exchange for links.
The problem was that, by definition, links marked nofollow do not bring any organic benefit.
Of course, many people in the SEO community will say that Google monitors unfollowed links.
However, Google’s official position was that nofollowed links were not included in any of the link verification algorithms.
Some time ago, Google extended link markup beyond nofollow.
Google introduced two new markups: Sponsored Content and User Generated Content.
For more information on these markups, see the Google Seach Central documentation.
It’s unclear how these new markups are used by the algorithm, but anecdotal evidence suggests they are.
So the answer to your original question is yes. You can offer discounts or other items of value to get the link.
But if the link you get doesn’t clearly state that it’s sponsored, it can confuse your site.
For most of us, risk is not worth the gain.
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