Selling links on your blog: Ethics or Money?

Who doesn’t like money? Everybody loves to have with a few bucks more in his pocket and I guess no webmaster is exception of this rule. The easiest way to get money from a blog or website is to advertise on it. Advertising companies is the usual and widely accepted way, this includes AdSense and AdBrite, or if we go on the affiliate network way, then Commission Junction and DoubleClick (Google). Other methods are, for example selling links on your website or simply writing so called sponsored reviews. These two are what I will argue about in this post.

Selling links on your website or blog

Selling links on your blog or website is strictly prohibited by the search engines and usually you get penalized if you don’t no-follow these links. That’s not a simple advice from the search engines, saying “You shouldn’t do it”, it’s a clear and simple rule which must be obeyed. Or you get yourself penalized and possibly removed from the search engines.
So, why are search engines so strict about link-exchanges? Because links are the base of the web and by selling these links webmasters poison the web. If links are sold on a website, those links will be adverts, thus the users have to know that the link they will follow it will land them on an advertiser’s page. The fact that every advertisement has to be clear to the consumers that it is an advert is stated in the European Community’s, the USA FTC’s and many other countries’ trade laws.
A user clicks on a link because thinks it will be useful for him. If you provide on your website links which are irrelevant to your content, you basically fool your users.
So how can you both sell links on your website and remain a good-guy? The search engines say that you should no-follow each link you put on your website and you don’t want to pass your reputation to. Like a payed link. The no-follow relation usually scares away the potential advertisers, but it shouldn’t really. They buy space on your page because they want traffic, if they don’t accept the no-follow tag, it means that they also wanted a piece of your Page Rank. And this is not really good.
Also, it’s up to you that you disclose that the link is a sponsored link or not. The ethics (and the trade rules) dictates that you should disclose, but since non-commercial websites and blogs aren’t governed by the trade rules and the ethics can also be put in the background in certain circumstances, again, it’s up to you what you do.
The no-follow tag has to be in place for every sponsored link, that’s the rule.

Sponsored reviews on your website or blog

That’s an odd situation, again. Starting from the “Everybody loves money” statement, one of the easiest way to get (almost) instant money is to write a 200-400 word long sponsored review on your blog. The problem appears when an advertiser requests from you to neither disclose that the article is a sponsored review, nor allow you to assign no-follow relation to the link which will point to the sponsor’s page. Excuse me, but as far as I my knowledge is OK, the advertiser wants to sell a product for example, not to increase its page rank by sucking a piece of your own rank.
The rules of the above mentioned linking rules should be followed in the sponsored reviews’ case, too. If you don’t apply the no-follow relation on the outgoing links from within the review, you will have issues with the search engines. That’s sure. Other than that, a sponsored review is advertisement, so your visitors should know that you wrote that article because you were hired to do so, not because you really — for example — recommend a service or product for them. But this depends on your ethics; if you’re an non-commercial website’s or blog’s author, you are not governed by any governmental trade law, of course, as far as I know.

My final thoughts are that webmsaters shouldn’t fool their visitors, and this applies to the ads and posts, too. Our websites are sponsored by the visitors, both directly and indirectly. If we fool them, we loose their confidence and they’ll never return. The worse case, when they start to spread that they were fooled by you.

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