Review of products and services is a very normal thing, especially in the print media. Many writers specialize in reviewing products and services that are of interest to the readers. If it appears online, there are a few things that may affect the site/blog in which it appears. That is when you reference the source, usually another site or sites where you can find such services. Good enough, from the readers’/ visitors’ point of view. But it is not so with search engines, especially Google. Google will say that you are writing for money (well, which journalist or creative writer does not want money?). Google will say that it is unnatural because it will help the referenced site to get a higher page rank (PR) and advises the webmasters to desist from buying and selling links in this way. If you do not listen, you will end up losing your PageRank. Google tells you to use "nofollow" so that it will be just another piece of advertisement or paid review, and not manipulating PR or link popularity. That means per se Google is not against the ads or paid reviews. In other words, persons selling ads, writing for money, including bloggers, are free to sell their services as usual.

Then what is the fuss about PR dropping and paid reviews? The problem is NOT with Google or bloggers. The problem is with the site owners/webmasters who hire your services who are buying links from you. If they are in fact interested in advertising with you or paying you for writing reviews, they should not object to "nofollow". If they object, they are trying to buy link popularity for pushing up their PR unnaturally. Google penalizes the PR of both buyers and sellers of links by lowering PageRank. Google’s search engine crawlers (bots) are programmed to detect such practices. If you want to report buying or selling of links to Google, CLICK the link: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?hl=en.

So, if you are not a LINK FARM, use nofollow. Change the code,
<a href="http://www.devilssite4u.com/devil.html/">

to

<a href="http://www.devilssite4u.com/devil.html/" rel="nofollow">.

That’s all to it. It protects you from PR reduction, it allows traffic from the link and it helps Google to give search results on merits of a site. Then, what is the harm in nofollow attribute?

Tags: nofollow attribute, link farm, link popularity, pagerank, report paid links