Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
This site, one of only a small handful of PR10 sites, is selling “Recommended” direct text links. I also noticed that most all of the sites buying “RECOMMENDED” links on this site, have lost that text link power.
Do you think this is a manual penalty or part of Google’s new algo [mattcutts.com...] to penalize sites that sell text links?
I do not hear any other chatter of a PR update.
What Matt said could happen to link sellers is that their outbound links might not be able to pass PR and backlink influence - not that they would be assessed a penalty.
It seems to me that many of their backlinks were devalued. Not just theirs, however, any backlinks of that particular "type" were devalued.
I am certain that we are discussing the same site.
I'm seeing more and more "normal" lower PR sites (PR4 and PR5) selling links, ones you wouldn't expect to be.
I hope that Matt and company put and end to it by using a fair algo that does not effect true natural links.
Some of my best inbound links (on one of my sites) "look" like paid links because bloggers have choosen to add me to thier template, ie, run of site links.
I hope these do not get dis-credited.
I think this is one of the cases where letting G know could be a decent idea, so they have enough hard data about sites and enough examples to be able to adjust for telling the difference. The one I just saw a little while ago plainly says they're advertising links, but I've seen others that just mix couple of off-topic links in with an on-topic one to make it look authentic.
Not that I think there's anything wrong with getting paid for advertising, people are entitled to be compensated for what they do and for their time (like good directories, on topic sites sending targeted traffic, etc.), but I think it's run into a situation where enough problems have been caused so that the more G can tell the difference (even if subtle), the better off everyone will be in the long run.
I don't know what to make of everything, but it would not be a good thing for innocent people to get zapped when they haven't done anything.
Yesterday’s Paper Telling Yesterday’s News :-)
You might wish to view what I have mentioned already on Apr 28, 2007 on this thread [webmasterworld.com] about drop of PR10 to PR9 of Statcounter ;-)
[edited by: tedster at 5:54 pm (utc) on June 3, 2007]
[edit reason] fix link [/edit]
Curious.
