Google Clarifies: Asking For Links The Right Way Is OK

Is Google now saying you can’t even ask for links without risk of a penalty? No, the search engine has clarified, after a post on its Portuguese webmaster blog suggested that.

The post drew a lot of attention from the SEO community because it specifically said that webmasters should not even ask for links.

That line was even bolded by the author, Google’s Diogo Botelho, who wrote, “não compre, venda, troque ou peça links,” which translates to “do not buy, sell, exchange or ask for links.”

Here are screen grabs of the non-translated and translated version:

Google’s John Mueller did say something similar to this back in February 2015, where he said webmasters should avoid link building because it is unnatural.

Google had no comment for over a day when we asked about this, so an earlier edition of this story was eventually posted with the headline of “Google: It’s Unnatural To Even Ask For Links To Your Site.”

A few hours after that, Google finally got in touch to clarify that the post has now been altered to say that you cannot:

Buy, sell or ask for links that may violate our linking webmaster guidelines.

We’ve bolded the key part. In short, asking for links is OK, as long as you don’t ask in a way against Google’s rules.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on social media at @rustybrick, +BarrySchwartz and Facebook. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio and disclosures, click over here.

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