Will Google Penalize This Setup?

Hey folks,


Here’s a theoretical scenario I’d love your take on.


Let’s say a site owner publishes a paid guest post with a do-follow link to the client’s website. But — and here’s the twist — at the bottom of the post they add a small disclaimer like:
“This article is a paid advertisement.”

Assuming the post and the link look natural otherwise (not a link farm, not spammy anchor, etc), what do you think Google is most likely to do?

1. Googlebot reads the “ad” notice and algorithmically devalues the link, treating it like a no-follow (even though it’s do-follow in code). So the buyer gets a weak or worthless link.
2. Google flags it as a potential link scheme, based on their outbound link policy
   (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/qualify-outbound-links).
   That could result in penalties for the linking site and maybe even for the target site.
3. Nothing happens. Google doesn’t care about such disclaimers and the link keeps full SEO value.

Anyone here with real-world experience or strong opinions?

lexxeagle said:

Let’s say a site owner publishes a paid guest post with a do-follow link to the client’s website. But — and here’s the twist — at the bottom of the post they add a small disclaimer like:
“This article is a paid advertisement.”

Click to expand...

this might screw up your client. It's not guaranteed, but there's a big chance of happening. And I also don't think your client would want this either, it's just as tagging the guest posts with the "rel=sponsored" tag that google have introduced a few years ago to trick naive site owners to snitch on their guest post buyers...

lexxeagle said:

Assuming the post and the link look natural otherwise (not a link farm, not spammy anchor, etc), what do you think Google is most likely to do?

1. Googlebot reads the “ad” notice and algorithmically devalues the link, treating it like a no-follow (even though it’s do-follow in code). So the buyer gets a weak or worthless link.
2. Google flags it as a potential link scheme, based on their outbound link policy
   (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/qualify-outbound-links).
   That could result in penalties for the linking site and maybe even for the target site.
3. Nothing happens. Google doesn’t care about such disclaimers and the link keeps full SEO value.

Click to expand...

I'd go with option 2

lexxeagle said:

Anyone here with real-world experience or strong opinions?

Click to expand...

I've got no real-world experience as I've never done this, but I do have a strong opinion about turning your buyers in, to an evil mega corporation

tazarbm said:

I'd go with option 2

Click to expand...

I'm also leaning toward option 2.

But here's the interesting part — I recently came across a site while buying a post, and the owner has been publishing paid articles with do-follow links and a “paid advertisement” disclaimer at the bottom... for about 10 years.
What's more, from what I can tell, around 90% of the pages on his site are exactly that type of content — guest posts, paid placements, all with that label.
His backlink profile? Pretty standard. Some average guest posts, some content marketplace stuff, and plenty of low-quality filler links. Nothing impressive.
And yet — both Ahrefs and MOZ show he's ranking for a solid number of keywords, with above-average organic traffic for his niche and region. No obvious penalties, no signs of trouble.
So now I’m wondering: could option 1 actually be legit?
Maybe Google does algorithmically devalue the link, but doesn’t penalize the site or treat it as a link scheme?

Anyone seen similar setups that are still holding strong?

lexxeagle said:

Maybe Google does algorithmically devalue the link, but doesn’t penalize the site or treat it as a link scheme?

Click to expand...

have you checked all sites that his paid advertisements link to? Doing this for 10 years and the linked to sites still being safe is hard to believe (for me at least)...

This being said, if it really is true, it could be one of those sites that flies under the radar and google never detects for whatever reason... or they know about it but use as bait to confuse us (they love doing this)...

Anyway, personally I'd not do this to people who buy guest posts from me. If you follow a few SEO safety tips, there's no way for google to ever know that those posts are paid...

Yes not guaranteed

In SEO terms, it doesn't matter if it's an ad you created for a client. If the article adds value to your website, it will rank.

joshua3100 said:

In SEO terms, it doesn't matter if it's an ad you created for a client. If the article adds value to your website, it will rank.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the input — just to clarify the situation a bit.


The site owner isn’t writing high-quality editorial content “for the client” or for the benefit of his own site.
He’s simply publishing content provided by the buyers. And as you can guess, the quality varies a lot — some are decent, some are total filler.
Plus, for the last couple of years, most of these articles are straight-up AI-generated with zero human editing.


So while I agree that strong content can make a big difference, in this case it’s hard to say the site is gaining rankings because the content “adds value.”
That's why I'm leaning toward the idea that Google either algorithmically devalues the link without penalizing the site — or just ignores the disclaimer altogether.


Curious to hear your take, considering this added context.