Contests: Google issues?
 

I am thinking about running a contest on my blog which would require people to post a link on their blog/website back to my blog.

Are there any issues with Google if I do that? They wouldn't consider that a paid link - would they?

just stay away from these words
"SPONSORS, PARTNERS, FEATURED, ADVERTISERS, ADS"
and more
"RELATED SITES, COOL SITES, RESOURCES, ALTERNATIVE LINKS"
read more
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/
there's more to it than meets the eye.

Quote:

Using nofollow is a safe way to buy links, because it’s a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine.

totally defeats link purpose

Originally Posted by Zona

Are there any issues with Google if I do that? They wouldn't consider that a paid link - would they?

Don't care too much for that paid links thing. Actually, if you read Google webmaster guidelines they recommend that you submit your site to relevant web directories such as Yahoo Directory which is a paid listing/link.