Free link on a Paid Link Blog

[giveacar]

Hi there,

I have been doing some outreaching, and managed to have a blog post accepted on a authority blog. They included links to my website, and I was very pleased with the placement. However, having browsed through the site, I was worried to see that they openly admit they allow 'reviews' of websites, with backlinks included, for $50 per review. I am worried I might be penalised without actually doing anything wrong. I did not pay for my link, but the link has been placed on a site which openly admits they accept payment for links.

Should I be worried? Should I ask them to take it down? To date I have been told countless times by bloggers I am outreaching that if I pay $10, $50, $100 etc I can write a blog post. I have never accepted because of the risk of penalization. Now, unwittingly, I am linked to from a paid link site with a blog post that would look like I have paid for it because of the placement and style of back link.

What do you think?

Thanks,

[MarkLoud]

Hi Tom, I guess there are a couple of points here to think about. Firstly is the blog in question relevant to the website it is linking to? Would the search engines find your featured article out of place on this blog and therefore look spammy? As long as your outreach campaign is targeting quality sites there is no reason to be concerned. Signs for concern for me would be an eclectic mix of posts and articles that make no sense being part of the same website / blog and / or a spammy looking link structure of it's own. After all paid links do work, as long as they are the right sort!

[EGOL]

The most likely consequence of this is that the link will have zero value.

Google is probably not going to penalize or ban  a site that has one single link from a naughty domain - otherwise weasels would buy links to competitor sites to get them nuked from the SERPS.

So, avoid having more links like this in your profile or doing anything naughty  and you will probably be OK.

[aarondicks]

If it's just this one link on one website then don't worry at all! Getting too many of these links will be a problem, but the odd one will not be a problem. How many sites are linked to from the individual page that you have your link on? You dont want to appear in amongst a lot of spammy links.