Freelance Designer Banner and Link Advertisers NoFollow Policy

Freelance Designer Advertisers:

Due to the recent actions by Google relating to paid links, some of our advertisers have requested we add a rel=nofollow tag into their banner or text link HREF tag. This is to ensure they are not violating Googles terms of service specifically the Link Schemes section.

Google suggests sites put a nofollow tag in paid links. We have decided to leave it up to the advertiser, as we screen each advertiser and only allow quality sites to advertise on freelancedesigners.com - Google has this to say about paid advertising:

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal
part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for
manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be
designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:
Adding a

1. rel="nofollow" attribute to the tag OR
   
2. Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

By default our ads do not have a nofollow tag and are direct links. This has been the default of all our ads for the entire life of the site which has existed in one for or another since 1997, we don't see a reason to change our policy now as we do not sell ads based on pagerank or to pass pagerank value, but based on the traffic to the site.

As an advertiser if you wish to have us add a nofollow tag into your link contact your sales rep, or open a support ticket in the memners area of freelancedesigners with the details of the banner or textlink and we will add the nofollow code.

You can read more about the paid-link nofollow controversy (quagmire?) here:

http://atlantaseo.blogspot.com/2008/01/google-and-paid-links.html
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/

A few highlights from Googles Matt Cutts' blog:

Q: Now when you say “paid links,” what exactly do you mean by that? Do you view all paid links as potential violations of Google’s quality guidelines?

A: Good question. As someone working on quality and relevance at Google, my bottom-line concern is clean and relevant search results on Google. As such, I care about paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings. I’m not worried about links that are paid but don’t affect search engines. So when I say “paid links” it’s pretty safe to add in your head “paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.”





Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?

A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.

With this reasoning, we feel that we are fine as we reject any paid advertising that does not meet our quality guidelines and does not relate spcifically to a freelancedesigners category.