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Comment by shawnc | Hacker News Reader

I operate a site that I haven't touched in a few years. It gets decent traffic but doesn't earn me anything. When iAquire approached me I accepted - and it's been a decent extra monthly income. I think it'd be near impossible for Google to shut down each site that was paid to link something.

Curious: why is this considered bad and textlinkads and Adwords OK? This is a genuine question.

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Google is fine with paid links as long as they are clearly advertising and don't try to manipulate organic ranking:

"Not all paid links violate our guidelines.... Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such."

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Textlinkads is not OK with Google. All paid links should have the rel="nofollow" attribute, as all Adwords ads do. That tells Google not to count them as editorial endorsement.

I don't know exactly what this iAquire does, but a "search marketing agency" sounds like a spammer by definition.

To answer your question: it might be because paid links are considered unacceptable by Google, and because texlink ads and other Google advertising is actually marked as advertising. Paid links are a type of spam, are dishonest, and are now an FTC violation unless explicitly disclosed on every page that contains them.

It's because AdWords links don't pass along credit that helps with search rankings. Google actually doesn't ban for paid links. It bans (potentially) for selling or buying links with the intention of improving your search rankings. There are several ways to have links that are sold that prevent that credit from passing.

has the (serverside) iAquire widget any markup (ul, li, divs, spans, table - layout) that stays the same over the whole network? if yes, then its pretty easy to identify the whole network for them.

They do not. They simply request a link... and most of the time request it in the middle of your content, written in like it's a natural link you happened to think was appropriate to your audience.

Thanks for all the answers guys - a clarity I appreciate and will take action on.

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