Advertising on the front page

Does anyone know if advertising on the front page is a good idea or not for search engines? I have a few community links and banners for our bank I want to add to the front page but I'm having second thoughts.

[kensmith]

Why would you add them? Do you feel they would benfit a visitor that came to your site looking for real estate information?

[MattL]

There has been rumor that the next round of changes will continue to penalize (or at least ignore) "sold" links and lower your site's score for doing so. You can probably get away with a couple of independent ads (like your bank), but I wouldn't go with a real ad network, because they will know.

-Matt

[Jim Messenger]

Hello Jill,

If you really want to please Google, use the rel=nofollow tag on all advertisements.

Originally Posted by realestatejill Does anyone know if advertising on the front page is a good idea or not for search engines? I have a few community links and banners for our bank I want to add to the front page but I'm having second thoughts.

If you have no problem sending your visitors there, then its no problem. Community links and local businesses, including banks, are certainly relevant. Authority sites link to sites that make sense.

nofollows are not needed for these links and it wont make a difference to Google. Advertise viagra and online poker and you need to use a nofollow.