New Article - Google's Paid-link Smack In The Face

[thejenn]

Authored by: Jill Whalen

Full Text: http://www.searchengineguide.com/jil...n-the-face.php

A Snippet:

The SEO world is abuzz today with Google's smack in the face to a number of websites that are selling obviously paid-for, keyword-rich text links. The gist of it is that the toolbar PageRank number has been reduced by a couple of points (or more) for many websites.

[Lincoln]

Evidently, I'm now a bigger authority than Autoblog. That's crazy.

Fun! But crazy.

[glnutrition]

IMO PageRank seems to serve nothing more than just being there for entertainment purposes. I don't sell text links on my sites. They are ecommerce sites so why would I? The PR on them all dropped by 2 anyways. I had a couple sites that had no PR that have a PR of 1 now... Wahoo!!!

But my traffic from Google has increased the past couple of days...

I have never had a site that got higher than a PR of 3, I been doing this for 10 years now and managed to still make a living on the internet... with our without PageRank.

As long as you are doing things the legit way then you should have nothing to worry about... PR or no PR...

[IworkFromHOME]

whoever wants to buy or sell paid link just go ahead. what is all the big problem. google not saying we can buy or sell. they are just saying if we buy or sell link we must put the nofollow tag. most of high PR blog use nofollow tag in their commentator's link that bring values to their blogs although it is not visible in term of money. but when it is about getting money values they said there are having trouble to put nofollow tag to their clients link. majority of search engine user have nothing to do with biz on the net so why should search engine follow the minorities.

[fastweb]

Matt Cutts warned webmasters about this a long time ago, and he was right. Google threw down the gauntlet. I don't necessarily care about link selling - if I had a high Pagerank site just sitting there doing nothing, I'd probably monetize it by selling links. But, I'd be smart enough about link placement that Google would never find out. Fortunately, in my situation, the websites I operate make their money the old fashioned way: through organic traffic that converts to leads then to sales.

@glnutrition: you're right to a point. Unfortunately, almost 70% of all U.S. web searches are through Google, and Pagerank is used as one of the factors when calculating search result positioning. That being said, I've had PR1 sites ranking in the top 5 for pretty competitive keywords and PR4 sites that were no where to be found. Pagerank is not the be-all-end-all in SEO.

[_detz_]

There is nothing wrong with paid links but when you sell OR buy them to either deceive your guests or (more importantly for Google) spiders than it's wrong and should be punished. Google's job is to find the best results for it's customers, if people are deceiving their guests into believing a page is better than what it is then it has a right and duty to do something about it.

P.S. As a computer person it's amazing how "dumb" some people are. I signed up for some of the text link places(curiosity) and within a matter of 15 minutes I could find hundreds of purchased links, if I can do that so can Google(probably faster).

One thing people also forgot is once you're on Google sh*t list it's very hard to get off. Is it worth it to be dropped or "flagged" on the largest search engine for a few dollars or one or two links on a larger site? I think not.

[TradeShowGuru]

There's one site that I know of that dropped PR from 4 to a 1. My guess would be no organic SEO. It seems as tho this was google's big dance and several people paid the price.

[theawristocrat]

Kinda fun seeing those very big blogs having the same pr w/ some low profile blogs. Good thing they still retain their ranking. Imagine if all those big blogs is nowhere to be found in google results page.