Google has been caught buying or paying for links before but doesn’t always take action against themselves when caught. Google’s John Mueller just talked about giving charity and getting a link and then shortly after Tad showed how Google Canada donated $20,000 and got a link on OpenMedia.

Here is Tad’s tweet:

Yes, there is a link without a nofollow on it, pointing to google.ca towards the footer:

Google’s John Mueller just talked about paid links via charity and if you need to worry. At the 6:40 mark into that video, he answered the following question:

John said in general, in this case, you probably don’t need to worry. Here is his full answer:

Here is the video embed:

Back in February, Google donated and got a link and Google didn’t do anything. in fact, the link still does not have a nofollow on it! A couple of years ago, the Chrome team was caught buying a $350,000 link and they did something similar in 2012. They ended up penalizing the Chrome site in 2012 for those actions but not for the 2016 actions. Google does take action against themselves when they go against their own guidelines, they did with the Chrome example, they did with AdWords for cloaking, they did for other cloaking issues and even slapped Google Japan years ago.

I doubt Google will do anything about this specific link as well.

Forum discussion at Twitter.