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]

[Miamacs]

If the drop is for show, it's not really for making examples, nor spreading fear among link sellers. I mean people are discussing this topic and whatever happens or doesn't happen to the actual rankings... ALL SEOs will know.

...

IF it doesn't bring any drops in rankings... my guess is that this is aimed at confusing link buyers, more than anything else.

If Google is trying to take away the $/link gauge, ( as useless as it was ) that's probably allright with most of us, no? If I was them, I'd be silently assasinating the PR passing capabilities of sites instead of promoting the next gold rush, but who knows. Maybe I'm underestimating how stup... uh I mean slow and ignorant the public can be ( yeah that's better ), and 95% of people *were* living in 2002, hunting for green pixels. If the link market's popularity boom was due to the masses slowly SLOOOOWWWLY inching towards the recognition of how Google works... - with a little help from brokers "educating" them on link benefits - or rather how it worked in '98- , this move is indeed a good one. It'll teach the public a lesson. Took them years to learn what PR is, and now they have to forget all about it... what a shame. *smirk*

But if lowered PR will bring drops in rankings as well...
And the move is essentially to deter SEOs, it's more like the announcement of a new FFA era.

...

I wonder if it did any good for Google's PR ( in both its meanings ) if the Washington Post looked at them, and laughed it all off with a 'Huh? Yes, I understand... so... PageRank, right? Excuse us, but... we don't really care.'

What message would that bear... with a direct connection to THE Google Trademark... and its algo... to the shareholders and the advertisers at large? 'PageRank? Yeaah, RIGHT... m-hm... And!?'

Not saying they should say this just saying ...what if they said what I said. Google is as caught up in playing SEO games as we are, I don't think the average citizen will be as shaked as the industry is...

[europeforvisitors]

Maybe I'm underestimating how stup... uh I mean slow and ignorant the public can be ( yeah that's better ), and 95% of people *were* living in 2002, hunting for green pixels.

I don't think the public could care less about the green toolbar. A lot of Webmasters and link-farm sharecroppers do, though, to judge from the constant stream of boilerplate link requests and purchase offers that clog inboxes and spam filters.

[CainIV]

What is interesting to me is that by lowering the green bar results they are basically voting for a system (visisble page rank) that they themselves were quoted less than 7 months ago in saying it is for entertainment purposes only...

It either has value or doesn't.

I have seen no visible change in ranks on one of my websites that dropped one pr point this week, but will monitor ranks and traffic closely...

[tedster]

Interesting times, eh? Some thoughts here:

If PR goes down on the toolbar, but search ranking and traffic don't change, what does that mean? Are the links are just as valuable as they were for the advertiser, too? Were the links already devalued, but no one was getting the "message"? By lowering the toolbar PR, is Google just taking away the advertising value of higher PR?

[kamikaze Optimizer]

IMHO:

If PR goes down on the toolbar, but search ranking and traffic don't change, what does that mean?

This is the warning. Google's history shows that they make bold moves, but this time they are giving fair warning due to the high profile sites involved. This way they have a defense from critics.

Are the links are just as valuable as they were for the advertiser, too? Were the links already devalued, but no one was getting the "message"?

ahh, ok, this is not my "humble opinion", but my direct knowledge as a ahh... reformed link buyer, (I have been clean for 156 days now) that Google has devalued paid links for some time now. They are worthless to me.

By lowering the toolbar PR, is Google just taking away the advertising value of higher PR?

At this time, yes.

[Kimkia]

I had a PR6 site, devalued to 5, then 4, over the past two years. Traffic is great. Just got penalized again, down to PR3, but there don't appear to be changes in SERPs yet.

I have six paid links in the right sidebar under a title of "Sponsored Links" with nofollow on all of them. One is a private deal, the others from a text link network.

I'm wondering if other sites who have been penalized have also clearly identified their text links as "Sponsors" and/or are using text link networks and whether it is this combo that is tripping Google's filters?

[tedster]

We've got several threads with essentially the same discussion. Let's take it all to the most recent:

Google Page Rank Updated [webmasterworld.com]