Penalty for Advertising

PR for sale penalty

[onebaldguy]

I just contacted a company about advertising on their site. They said they would be interested, but were too afraid that they would get penalized for "selling PR".

What is the general consensus on WW? Do you think google will actually penalize a site for selling ads? I think that they may discount the PR transfer of a link that it considers to be a "paid link" (or advertisement). But I highly doubt they would PENALIZE either of the sites (the one that has the ad on it or the one that is advertising). If they did penalize for this, content providers would be furious, because it would create drop in advertising.

The Search King case may prove that theory wrong, but I think it is different since they publicized the fact that it was true "PR for sale" not advertising. On the other hand, if they would have simply left out the "PR for sale" aspect of the promotion, do you think they would have still been penalized?

[rogerd]

The majority of commercial sites sell ads of one type or another. It's difficult to imagine a Google penalty except for sites that appear to be promoting their PR as in, "Buy a text link on our PR8 home page - only $__ per month!"

Ultimately, they may have to crank up link relevance in the algo. This won't eliminate PR selling, but it will cut down on the more egregious examples. Unfortunately, it may cut down the value of some good, authoritative links (like the NYTimes article that mentioned your site).