Official: Selling Links Can Hurt Your PR or Google Rankings

[trakkerguy]

Danny Sullivan wrote a very informative post yesterday about the selective PR rollback some sites experienced last week, and makes some astonishing claims -

So I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links

and

In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well

and

Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review.

Seems like big news to me. Did I miss someone pointing this out already?

[edited by: tedster at 5:32 am (utc) on Oct. 9, 2007]
[edit reason] copied from another location [/edit]

[jomaxx]

I can name 2 sites offhand that charge between one and two thousand dollars a year for a listing.

I'm glad to see MC dealing with the issue of legitimate directories that have a listing fee. The ability to use ESP to determine the "primary purpose" of the listing fee seems like typical Google hubris, but at least I now know that such links don't automatically have to be nofollowed if I'm careful.

[europeforvisitors]

The ability to use ESP to determine the "primary purpose" of the listing fee seems like typical Google hubris

It doesn't take ESP to guess that a fee of $1,000 or $2,000 a year is a "listing fee," not a "submission fee," or that a directory with heaps of junk listings isn't using its fees to pay for editorial reviews.

Feed pages that don't pass a human sniff test into a black box, and let the computers figure out where the patterns lie.

[kamikaze Optimizer]

europeforvisitors:

Well stated, as always.

I think my comment regarding the $1-$2K per year fee had the word "Value" included. If I could find a directory that provided me 'value' at this cost, then I would take a close look at it.

I am just finding it hard to believe that any directory can support that value to me.

[jomaxx]

The sites I'm thinking of are sort of "prestige" niche destinations. It's clear to me that (in these particular cases) advertisers would be paying for the organic benefits of being seen by humans rather than spiders. In fact neither company really has enough PR to sell it for SEO purposes even if they wanted to -- both have a root pagerank of 6.

[Interent Yogi]

I am paying 1300 a year for a directory . It is a higher end market and 2 sales cover it, not to mention the PR /Trust rank that is delivers.

[kamikaze Optimizer]

...not to mention the PR /Trust rank that is delivers.

You just said it. You are paying for the PR and Trust Rank.

Not to call you out, but... what is the real value?

[soapystar]

2 sales cover it

seems the other value

[glengara]

"..legitimate directories that have a listing fee.."

Quite a rare beast IMO.....

[Reno]

"..legitimate directories that have a listing fee.."
Quite a rare beast IMO.....

Why should anybody give anything for free other than pure generosity (which of course is admirable)? We all have expenses and time associated with our web site ventures, and some compensation for that is not unreasonable. I think Google understands that -- I'm just not sure they are explaining themselves as clearly as we'd like.

..........................

[europeforvisitors]

Why should anybody give anything for free other than pure generosity (which of course is admirable)? We all have expenses and time associated with our web site ventures, and some compensation for that is not unreasonable.

Shhhh. Google might hear you and charge for listings in the organic SERPs. :-)

Seriously, there's a very obvious reason why a directory would provide listings for free: to attract "eyeballs" that can be monetized through advertising. It's no different from THE NEW YORK TIMES reviewing a new movie for free or a travel magazine mentioning a cruise line's launch of the S.S. WIDGETONIA for free. It isn't about generosity or altruism; it's about enlightened self-interest and attracting or retaining an audience.

[glengara]

I've no particular problem with a "review" fee, it's the addition of "legitimate" that makes it a rare beast :-)

[Reno]

there's a very obvious reason why a directory would provide listings for free: to attract "eyeballs" that can be monetized through advertising

Which could very well be paid links which is what triggered this thread in the first place.

Round and round we go...

............................

[europeforvisitors]

Which could very well be paid links which is what triggered this thread in the first place.

If it's a free link, it's free.

[Reno]

If it's a free link, it's free.

And if it's an advertising link, it's paid.

..........................

[proboscis]

Unless you paid a review fee, then it's free.

[jomaxx]

This is a productive loop. Anyway Yahoo has a mix of free and paid links, and it's worked out pretty well for them.

They also seem like a good example of a directory where sites pay for the evaluation rather than the listing. I don't know if there are too many other sites who have the clout to keep the customer's money even if the site to be listed fails the quality review.

[Interent Yogi]

Yes 2 sales cover it, is the value and it provides more than that. It is a highly trafficed local directory . 98% of the users would have no idea that it helps with trust rank outside of the directory.

The directory was recently bought for around the 1.5 Billion USD mark .

[edited by: Interent_Yogi at 8:36 am (utc) on Oct. 14, 2007]

[digitalv]

Ok, so can someone explain this "review" process to me? I've updated my links with the nofollow tag. Does that mean Google could put my PR back where it should be?

[typicallyspanish]

We were hit by a drop from 6 to 5 around the 9th of the month, and now Google has taken us down from 5 to 4!
We sell directory links as a source of income, but only as related advertising in our niche directory - not for page rank, and certainly not as a link farm.

We have now prohibited google access to the directory links in the robots.txt file.

We consider Google has penalised our site unfairly, given we are also the leading source of original content for news for our niche, and every page is now being penalised with a two point lower page rank.

We have asked for a reinclusion after this double penalty - but I'm not holding my breath. In effect we are having to change our income generating and business structure, simply because of this.

[derekwong28]

There seems to be second wave of sites being penalized going on right now. A lot of well known directories and blogs have been hit, with PR dropping by 2-3 notches.

[jakegotmail]

green bar dropping does not = penalty

[Rlilly]

> green bar dropping does not = penalty

It would seem to me to be a penalty in the form of "less PR passed" as per what MC said.

[kamikaze Optimizer]

I see it also in the three example sites that I described on page 4.
All three have dropped down 2 more notches of PR.

Imagine that, going from a PR9 to a PR6…

[rustybrick]

Did anyone see a drop in traffic from Google after your TB PageRank score dropped?

[kamikaze Optimizer]

Did anyone see a drop in traffic from Google after your TB PageRank score dropped?

According to Alexa, the three sites that I looked at took big hits.

[kamikaze Optimizer]

I am going to retract my comment above. The sites I follow took a hit when this thread started, but have regained any rankings that they lost.

[twtnyc]

well i went from a 5 in may to a 4, then to a 1 about 6 weeks ago or so, and today ZERO. my internal pages still have some rank, where they were 3/4 now they're 2

it's an e-commerce site that i sell advertising partnerships on. i have 3 links that pay for my dude to tweak things that go wrong. i don't buy any links, i can't afford to!

i'm not keyword stuffed, i wrote articles about ingredients in my products, i started writing a buying guide for visitors...

i cleaned out my reciprocal linkspages and trimmed a bunch that were mfa about two months ago...

and now the site is worthless, and i'm about to debut new products, new packaging in december since people searching for my keywords won't find me and my advertisers will bug out too. :(

my site can't be found ANYWHERE.

they could at least send you an email if your site gets redflagged and TELL YOU in plain english exactly what's wrong.

i should be able to sell enough advertising to offset my costs.

damn.

[edited by: tedster at 1:21 am (utc) on Oct. 25, 2007]
[edit reason] remove specificz [/edit]

[fjpapaleo]

"Why can't google just admit the link juicer is broken and turn it off? I'm curious how many people would like to see it unplugged."

I would love it. Than maybe everyone could get back to working on their websites instead of being the link whores Google has turned everyone in to.

[FlexAjaxSEO]

"Official selling paid links" why not say "paid links": what does the "official selling" part of the PAID links mean? In good English how can a selling be paid? Sorry but what is being described is not so much the links but the loss of PR due to the volume of outbounds in my view, on close read of his article.

[tedster]

1. The information is "official": it comes from Google. Up until recently, it was conjecture.
2. It's the link "seller" who is getting nailed
3. My guess, Danny still wanted the phrase "paid links" in the title, so he went a bit redundant.

what is being described is not so much the links but the loss of PR due to the volume of outbounds

Outbound links do not "reduce" a page's PR, they only lower the level of PR that the page can circulate internally. We're talking about a MANUAL reduction in PR for sites who are selling links. And it is happening - two batches already in October ( see [webmasterworld.com...] )