Few are aware of the stringent requirements Google has set forth for site owners regarding advertising links.  At A Frog In My Soup, I need to comply with these guidelines…but will only do so as laid forth below.  It is vitally important that I follow these guidelines both for my site and for your feature so that we are able to continue to get great traffic to view your products.  Non-compliance can lead to removal from Google’s search engine!

Here’s the details….

Google states:

“Search engine guidelines require machine-readable disclosure of paid links in the same way that consumers online and offline appreciate disclosure of paid relationships.”

Google’s position on Paid Links:

“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

“Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

* Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the anchor tag
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file”