News websites are a great link-asset to get valuable links with traffic to your site, let’s face it, Google created the link-buying industry, and while news publishers are suffering with the rise of blogging websites and social media, few advertisers are relying on Tier1 news websites for their ads.
So selling links is kinda reasonable business model for publishers to stay in business, but it’s against Google guidelines, therefore The Washington Post, Forbes and other esteemed news portal received their share of penalties.
That was in 2007, but the rules standstill, it’s worth mentioning that unlike other Penalties, these sites generally didn’t lose rankings in Google, though Google reserved the right to do that. IE, you could still find their home pages and much of their content in Google searches, but their external links are attributed no-follow.
Many SEO’s are paying thousands of dollars for links that bring no value, as Google is ignoring the referring domain due to link scheme, but it’s impossible to measure a link value so publishers will keep on selling, it’s a hidden chaos!
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