Are links in sponsored articles juicy?

[mou]

Hi There

I've been offered a sponsored article in a national newspaper that can contain up to 3 dofollow links.

Something similar to this http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/271282

The question is would this be seen by Google as a paid link (which it is really I guess) and thereby pass no link juice?  It's pretty expensive so don't want to get it wrong.

Any thoughts gratefully received!

[THB]

These sites don't pass the juice that they may have once passed as it become such an easy way for people to pay to get hundreds, even thousands of backlinks in a matter of a couple days without even having to distribute quality content articles.

I can't confirm what amount of juice they might pass as I just don't know, but I'm confident it's not the full amount that you might get if say BBC News picked you up outside of a sponsored article.

Reason being, in my opinion, is that these sites have just become littered with press releases that are not of much quality (not all, but most).  And Google has recognized this and is dealing with it appropriately.  In all honesty, who actually goes to http://ezinearticles.com/ to read the articles?  Not me.  But people just use it to try and get a million backlinks; meanwhile, Google has completely stripped the site of passing any PR externally.  Same as its done with Craigslist and other classifieds websites.

So, in my opinion, don't exert too much energy on these kinds of releases.  They can help get you a wee bit of recognition as it never hurts to get your name out there one way or another, but you're not going to see any significant increase in traffic, if any at all.

Your best to focus that same energy on creating relationships with companies that compliment your site, and vice versa.

Hope that helps.

• Marc