ciml - 4:53 pm on Mar 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

I agree with Dynamoo, most people outwith the search industry wouldn't see ethical issues in this. People can choose whom they link to; engines can decide which links and pages to include.

Brett:
> We've not talked about selling pr for awhile now and it's grown by leaps and bounds.

It certainly has! Back when the "-link:" search worked it was often easy to track back where people were getting their PR from. If you followed the highest PR inbound recursively you'd find a source that has plenty of 'organic' PageRank. In some industries, the PR suppliers to the top sites are mostly selling links. Usually, it's not hard to tell.

So, there are plenty of sites selling links that Google must surely know of. Does that mean that we should all go an join in? No. Many of those sites could be wiped out at a time of Google's choosing; up until the recent round of penalties, people were getting the impression that Google didn't care about cross-linking any more.

I've seen plenty of people who obviously continue to pay for links after the links don't count any more. The 'can have PageRank but not pass it on' penalty has often been discussed, but I'm getting the feeling now that Google are allowing some pages to pass PR selectively. I don't know if they choose on a link by link basis, or if they have a 'can have PageRank but not pass it on externally' penalty. Either way, the comments we've all read from GoogleGuy make sense, you may not be getting what you think you're paying for.