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What google says about it?
Is that a safe practice?
We are talking about legitimate sites (no link farms or artificially boosted PR) that sell some links...
You can seek for a related site, with good PR and just pay for a link to your site...
What do you say?
I go to a forum similar to WebmasterWorld. on the bottom of all pages they have advertisers in plain text, they sell these spots. could it be geniune advertisements? sure, I guess. is anyone really shelling out that money for the people going from the forums to their site? no.
people buy the links for the PR. this isn't uncommon at all- tons of sites sell text links, some knew perfectly well that they're selling PR but are careful not to say it, others may not know at all.
but the bottom line is: it's not practical to punish people for selling advertisements, as 99% of sites out there depend on ads to survive.
Previously these websites used to market their sites by giving stats of the no of visitors on their site. Now they're talking about the PR advantage.
I think, Nothing wrong with it.
So if the site is pitching that it is selling PR, you can expect that google will block them out. As they should to protect what is theirs.
Google also has the right to block PR from passing from any site, if they think that the links from that site adversly affect the SERPs. It does not matter if they are "bought links" or not.
How would Google identify these sites?
You need a very high PR to be able to give a noticable PR boost. So they probably only check those sites with at least one page that is a PR8 or above.
Then you check all the sites that are linked to from this site. If they would mostly be <PR3 without that link, this would probably trigger a human review of the situation. Are these sites worthy of the boost they are getting?
Of course, if the links that are causing the problems are obviously advertising links, then that would increase the odds of having the PR transfer blocked, but that does not mean that Google is out to stop ads from counting towards your PR.
The best way to avoid having this happen to you is to avoid going for the big kill on the buying of links. Get a bunch of PR4-5 links from different sources. Then pick up some PR6s links, always from different sources. Finally, when you have built yourself up in this way, you can then go ahead and go for one or two big PR links.
Of course, it is also wise to make sure that your site is the sort of site that Google wants to have at the top of the SERPs. I think far too few SEOs and webmasters ever bother to think about that part of the equation. When they do QA on their algo, you don't want your site at #1 to be the one that they feel a need to remove from that spot.
And if you have a high PR site where you are selling links, never even mention PR. And you also need to be picky about who you sell your advertising links to. If you do not want your PR passing ability blocked, then only link to quality sites that have already built up some good links on their own.
Whenever anyone makes money off of Google without them seeing a dime, they will dislike it.
As far as I'm concerned, I see no problem buying links. I don't think your site will be penalized and I think that is more of a scare tactic spread across the community.
Everyone needs to sell space - even Google
True. I think time has come for the concept of "Google-certified" links - links that could pass PR and won't be penalized for. A nominal review fee of $299 could be charged for Google-certifying a page. gov, edu and amateur sites with fewer than, say 100 links or linking page PR < 5, might be excluded from this requirement. Others could take their chances and get links with non-certified pages.
The value of a link on a PR4 or PR5 page is near zilch if the link is being bought solely for PR reasons.
>What google says about it?
Is that a safe practice?
We are talking about legitimate sites (no link farms or artificially boosted PR) that sell some links...
I'd STRONGLY advise if selling links for the seller to mention anything about Google PR. However, if you just set a price for links, if it is worth it for PR reasons than buyers can see the page PR and figure this out on their own. And, if the target audience is people who are buying links for PR, then DO make sure to sell links on no longer than a month to month basis. Nobody will want to buy a link for PR otherwise, because they can't know what the future PR of the page will be.
Too much human editing envolved with that idea. Google would rather work on elimiting page rank from the algo than to do this. Think about it, a page can be certified today, but what about tomorrow? Who is going to check to make sure that these pages stay within guidlines without using alot of human reviewing?
IMO PR days are numbered. Maybe not this year or the next, but at some point this will no longer be part of the algo.
Did google take the time to design my site, create the content and get the links that I have? No...The PageRank that my site has is definitely mine. Unless you are talking about google owning the term "PageRank", then I guess you are right.
Am I right in thinking you meant to say:
"I'd STRONGLY advise if selling links for the seller to not mention anything about Google PR."
ok that's a good point but I still don't think they should own it and try to control it like communist. I think they should have an authority over it just like the United States government has authority over money. The government doesn't own "money". Everyone owns a portion of it but if you're bad and embezzle money then the government can step in and take it away from you. It's ok to sell money in the form of a loan or whatever but not PageRank? You should be able to do whatever the hell you want with your PageRank as long as you don't break any rules to get it. google created the idea of PageRank (and it is a great idea) but the people create the actual PageRank. Think about it. If everyone pulled their site offline, their would be no PageRank for Google to own or control or whatever so really the people own PageRank.
I still don't think they should own it and try to control it like communist.
Now that is funny. They own it like a capitalist. And like a capitlist, they can do with it what they please because they own it.
While PageRank uses the links you got to feed the calculations, the results are owned by google. And they are free to do with it as they wish in Google's best interests.
I think they should have an authority over it just like the United States government has authority over money. The government doesn't own "money". Everyone owns a portion of it but if you're bad and don't pay your taxes then the government can step in and take it away from you.
Now that sounds like communism.
That is also incorrect in the way that the law works. Their control is over the citizens and what happenes in our territiories. If a columbian and a panamanian make a US cash deal, our government has no stake in that transaction.
It's ok to sell money in the form of a loan or whatever but not PageRank?
Nope, because PageRank is not your's it is Google's. You can sell a link from your site, because it is your's to sell.
If you are selling PageRank, you are essentially selling Google traffic instead of selling traffic from your site. If anyone is going to get paid for selling google traffic, it should be Google.
You should be able to do whatever the hell you want with your PageRank as long as you don't break any rules to get it.
You should be able to do whatever you want with your linking, including breaking any rules set by google because your linking is yours and Google's rules are not laws.
Google should be allowed to do whatever they want with PageRank and the calculation that generates it, because it is theirs. If it is in their interest to do something to PageRank, they should do it.
google created the idea of PageRank (and it is a great idea) but the people create the actual PageRank.
No, PageRank is created as a result of a calculation. You did not create it.
Think about it. If everyone pulled their site offline, their would be no PageRank for Google to own or control or whatever so really the people own PageRank.
Nope, then the only site with a PageRank score would be google.
They are paying for links from sites that are completely unrelated with the intent of manipulation. I don't care about the PR, but these incoming links are ARTIFICIALLY pushing them up SERPS.
WAKE UP GOOGLE! BIG POCKETS SHOULDN'T BE REWARDED!
WAKE UP GOOGLE! BIG POCKETS SHOULDN'T BE REWARDED!
I'm not so sure that I agree, especially in the commercial areas.
In the real world, buying advertising is how companies become known. And the advertising for The Big Guys is rarely done in an on topic forum.
Let's look at car makers.
They all advertise in the on topic forums, such as car magazines, but they do not advertise as heavily as you would think. The readers of those magazines already know all the cars that are out there.
They also advertise in Playboy, Good Housekeeping, Fine Homebuilding, Scientific American, etc. Talk about a bunch of off-topic ads (links).
Then they go and buy ads in the Super Bowl (PR10) even though they have nothing to do with football. And they put extra effort into makeing the ads entertaining, because they know that they will also get picked up and mentioned in all the discussions of superbowl ads (free SERPs).
Yeah, Google has to do a bit of a balancing act, but some of you seem to think that google should only serve up the small sites.
I just hope that if a company spends lots of money buying advertising links, that they also spend a lot of money making their site the best it can be for the user once they get there.
A better comparison is banner advertising on Yahoo!. That makes sense.
Buying a link to be placed in a SPONSORED section with a bunch of other links that are not related to you or the site you are on is ridiculous. Are you really trying to reach a wider audience? Or are you trying to manipulate your popularity in the eyes of Google?
For example: Owning a viagra site and buying a link on every page of a CGI site that has 1000's of pages is effective marketing to reach a wider audience. That makes sense, not!
I agree. Even placing ads on topic-related sites influences the serps. Best strategy might be to ignore links from PR5 and above pages. Still they will try to influence the serps by buying links from smaller PR pages but the task will be much harder.
While I am not a seller of viagra, a link to my home page is included at the bottom of every new article in an online adventure magazine as "additional resources". An algo could easily decide that these were put there to cheat, but in fact, we have never been in contact with anyone at that site. The only way that I found out about these links because they actually drive some traffic to us. We get between 10 and 50 a month from each of their articles. But I doubt that they make much of a difference in the SERPs, as they all point to the home page and use our domain name as the link text.
If google decides to block links like that, it is fine with me, I will probably rank better because of it. But I think the decision to block those links might be a tougher decision than you are suggesting.
Does someone indeed know about penalties because of selling or buying links?
One last comment from me about this. I think it would be cool if G decided to hide the little green PR bar and just continue the PR calculations behind the scenes. It is a catchy little marketable thing but hiding the bar would add some more mystery to the equation and would get people to focus on other things that would benefit the serps.
Just advertise your site in whatever way works best for you. I will continue advertising on other sites, even if I have to pay for the link, because I get traffic! It converts better for me than ppc!
Would you continue to pay if you find out that the other site has blocked the PR transfer?
google should
1) eliminate all public means of viewing pagerank
and
2) toss out link: from google
I think it'd really have a positive impact on the SERPs in the long term.
