Page / Domain Authority Question

[cat5com]

If my website were to purchase a sponsored article on a site with a powerful domain authority that contained a do-follow link, and the link would be "domain.com/articles/new-article" ... obviously new-article would have 0 page authority, being new... is that still considered a valuable link and why or why not?

[DmitriiK]

Hi.

Yes and no. Look more at DA, rather than PA. PA is awesome, but it's much more valuable to get a link from low PA page on high DA site, rather than don't get link at all. At the same time it rarely happens that there is a really high PA page on very low DA domain, there is a correlation between those. Yes, sometimes PA can be higher than DA of a given domain, but not by much. Basically, you won't be able to have 99 PA on domain with 20 DA.

Now, you're talking about paid do-follow link. You're just asking for trouble, aren't you? Google has been talking for long time that they penalize for paid links. Watch these videos: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=matt+cutts+paid+links&tbm=vid

So, if you do decide to do it - yes, it's gonna be valuable if you don't get penalized

[cat5com]

Thank you for your insight! Followup - how does Google know if the link was paid for?

[DmitriiK]

Good question, isn't it? I wish somebody knows exact answer, but I'm not friends with Matt Cutts

From what I heard, read etc, my understanding is that Google knows websites, who are selling links, by simply reading the content and links on that website. Example: if website has a page with prices for articles with links or press releases, Google bots can read that content and understand what the page is about. Then they look at how many of outgoing links on website are do-follow, how often they appear, diversity of those links etc. Basically, if 99% of outgoing links are do-follow and they are all to different domains, the picture is pretty clear. If picture is not clear enough, bots would send a request to manual action team.