Search Engine Question

[music_lp90]

Does anyone know whether search engine bots follow paid advertisement links that have an address such as http://ads.addesktop.com/ads/ad12946bl-map...0A/kw=homepage/ ? Just wondering if paying for advertisements like this are worth anything to search engine rankings. Thanks!

[Skemcin]

The link produces a blank page, so it is hard to say what exactly happens here.Most bots are able to distinguish external (out of domain) links and rarely help your site - if anything you help the target site by referencing them. Search engines work very similarly to word of mount advertising. If you reference something, and you seem reputable, then the site you reference gets a ranking bump. Your "reputation" would be based on the same logic - people linking to your site fro valid information.

[aspnetguy]

Buying advertisements has no SEO value 99.9% of time. That is because most ad platforms place the links with JavaScript which SEs can't read or they use the rel="nofollow" attribute which makes the link useless for SEO. Advertisements are ment for exposure and gaining traffic and that is what they do.The only way to buy pagerank is to buy links without rel="nofollow" for other sites. Doing so is risky because you or the selling site could very likely get penalized by Google (the text link sale police ). Those penalties could be a dramatic drop in search result rank or a decrease in your sites pagerank. Some sites even get a PR 0. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to the penalties. I guess it depends on the mood of the Googler that catches you.The best way to increase your search engine rank is to have good quality content. When you promote your contnet people will like and link to you and your ranking will go up.

[music_lp90]

Thanks, that's kind of what I thought, but wasn't sure.