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Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

Can someone actually explain or try to convince me why paid links are bad? What about non-paid SEO links? I am not familiar with the arguments.

Say I am running a blog and I am asking my friends to include my blog link in everyone one of his links regardless what. And we are just doing this to get each other noticed. Say he's writing a C++ tutorial and I will also cook up a Python equivalent and say "hey guys if you want to check out the Python one, go check out my friend's blog here."

It's almost like me asking someone to promote my Youtube Channel (hey guys please subscribe X's new channel) in the video and in description.

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Your scenario isn't exactly what happened here. Rather, how would you feel if your friend asked you to link 10 Justin Bieber songs in your Python tutorial?

But two site owners decided that they can benefit each other if they provide links to each other's site.

As I said, I am asking my friend to link my Python's and I link his C++.

I can treat him a lunch when I get some ad revenue later. Or just a bro hug.

I understand it may not actually be showing what is happening here, but there is some gray area I want to explore.

I can also be a celebrity and every week I feature a couple links showing what my friends and my other celebrity friends are doing or writing or making. I may or may not get $$. Maybe just to be friendly (think Youtube, how channel owners help other owners...) Will that violate Google's ToS? I am famous and so helping a few people out shouldn't hurt, right?

You seem to keep using examples with friends or buddies, and no one is gonna fault you for sharing a link to your buddies site from your site, especially if you say "Here's my buddies/friends site...you should check them out"..thats genuine

the problem here is they are/were promoting a campaign in which they were asking you to specifically place "beiber" links on your blog, so that they get better page ranks in google.

you and you're buddy (or even a celebrity helping out their friend for free) are trying to share a particular link with your blogs viewers, and that single instance will probably not have a crazy effect on google page rank

RG is trying to game the system by getting bieber backlinks on a bunch of blogs in trade for a tweet...thats against googles rules

This: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks

It's because using links to rank search results is only valid if the links are organic. Once people start paying for links, now the existence of the link is only indicating who paid for links, not who has good content. That's why Google penalizes them.

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