

W3.org Paid Links for only $2500-$10000 **edit Nofollowed** - kyle6884
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/sup-faq#fillappl
Can I get a link on this page?
Yes. Premier and Major W3C Supporters may have links to their sites from this page.<p>Premier Supporters have made a contribution of 10000 USD.
Major Supporters have made a contribution of 2500 - 9999 USD
======
pkamb
"W3C makes no assurances that sites linked from the Supporters program will
see improved ranking in search engine results. W3C instructs search engines to
ignore links from the Supporters page."

~~~
aaronsw
They have a nofollow meta in the head of the page, which according to
[http://www.seobook.com/robots-txt-vs-rel-nofollow-vs-meta-
ro...](http://www.seobook.com/robots-txt-vs-rel-nofollow-vs-meta-robots-
nofollow) is as good as rel="nofollow" when it comes to PageRank.

~~~
Natsu
If the paid links don't pass PageRank, I don't think Google has a problem with
them. I've seen Matt Cutts say that quite a bit lately, because Forbes was
caught doing this (again).

------
acangiano
Wikimedia Foundation does the same to support Wikipedia. Check out the list of
Sustaining Corporate Donors: <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Benefactors>

Unlike W3.org, these aren't nofollow links. So they are outright bought for
anchor text goodness and PR juice.

~~~
thegyppo
I wouldn't be surprised at all if Google manually stops PR from passing from
this page.

------
benologist
Google needs to just accept links are irreversibly compromised. They're not a
measure of usefulness anymore.

There are companies that specialize in submitting crap to digg, reddit, even
here on HN - those are all paid links.

Infographics are a marketing tool sites use to generate links - you pay your
money, someone designs it and submits it to social news sites to generate
links back to your completely unrelated website. Those are paid links too, and
not necessarily the aforementioned ones.

The mainstream blog networks are virtually content farms these days churning
out summaries designed to do nothing more than reinforce their search
positions for companies and products etc.

There's a big market for selling and swapping links, any forum for webmasters
of any kind is going to have that at play.

Then there's flat out _spam_ \- last year I watched a site get all the way up
to the top 10 for "free online games" with nothing more than blog spamming
software.

There's all the sponsorships, endorsements, paid promotions, reviews with
incentives, referral/affiliate stuff, etc etc.

So many ways money can change hands to cause a link to appear on a site.

Meanwhile there's a _massive_ amount of the internet that is not going to get
any legitimate link love, ever.

------
kyle6884
See "Major Supporters" <http://www.w3.org/Consortium/sup>

~~~
qeorge
Cool, thanks for the clarification. Deleted my comment about nofollows.

~~~
rit
Not sure what the comment was, they do say as earlier linked in the FAQ that
they instruct Search Engines to ignore links.

This I just found in the HTML for the linked supporters page:

    
    
            <meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW" /> 
    

It would appear they are nofollow'ing the links and they should not really be
considered 'paid links' WRT increasing pagerank.

~~~
qeorge
Original comment was that the links were nofollowed. On the Current Members
page they have the nofollow attribute right on the links.

In response, Kyle linked me to the Major Supporters page, on which the links
themselves do not have the nofollow attribute, so I deleted my comment.
However, it seems both Kyle and I forgot to check meta tags, and the links in
question are indeed nofollowed.

Good catch. :)

------
nwwlth
what a deal

------
ddemchuk
just because a link is nofollow does not mean it will not help your rankings
guys. It does not mean "ignore this link please Google" it means "I don't
vouch for this link Google". A nofollow link will still count towards your
total link profile.

