To follow or nofollow paid internal links?

[irvingw]

I am having an internal debate on the need to use nofollow tags on sponsored internal links that link to internal pages. One thought is based on this Matt Cutts video  (Should internal links use rel="nofollow"?) in which he says that there is never a need to use a nofollow tag on an internal link. The other school of thought is that paid links with follow tags are a violation of Google policy and it does not matter if they link internally or externally. Matt was just not thinking of this scenario in his short video. Would love to hear if anyone has had any manual action from Google based on their internal links.

[ZephSnapp]

Hi,

I am not sure I understand the question...are you saying that you have links from one part of your site to another that have been paid for with money?  That seems like a really strange way to do things.

[TakeshiYoung]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean either, but how you link within your own site is your own business, and you won't get penalized for it. Unless the internal link is 301 redirecting to an external site, you can link however you want.

[irvingw]

The site features tens of thousands of profiles. Profile owners can purchase sponsored links that will feature their  profiles in strategic sections of the sites. These links can be featured on internal search results, related profile pages and on the top of the directory listings. The only reason their links are displayed is because they bought into the program.

[TakeshiYoung]

Yeah, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. That's like someone paying money to Facebook to have their page show up prominently in the sidebar. It's an advertisement or featured placement.

The Google policy is in reference to buying links from sites to manipulate search rankings, not to internal links on your own page. Nofollow should only be used for sites you don't trust, direct competitors, and paid links.

[ZephSnapp]

I won't bother writing too much as Takeshi has pretty much covered it (IMO).

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Interesting question. I don't think Google has every penalized anyone for passing Pagerank to themselves. Technically all paid links should be nofollowed according to Google's policy. Practically speaking, in your case, it's more of a grey area although I seriously can't anticipate too many negative consequences.