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If you say you sell relevant text links or text ads, you're ok but if you say you sell PageRank you paint a bullseye on your forehead and you'll get PR0'd or the links will not pass PR?
Just because you have a recipie go to the store buy some flour, yeast, and water, it doesn't mean you're going to end up with a good loaf of bread.You need to know how to buy the 'right' links and how to bring them together, or else you'll end up with a sticky-gooey blob that will never rise.
LOL! An excellent analogy - though one could argue that any amount of linking will have some effect on the serps.
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As far as the bigger question: D'OH! Of course its all about semantics! So's everything else that straddles the fine line between "somewhat shady" and outright illegal. (Or in this case, unethical).
But who cares? Anyone with half a brain can figure that one out (at least anyone who wants to stay in business).
My site for example, very clean, whiter than white, but I went out to buy a selection of multi page links. My site is now white barred (from a PR4). A hint of the problem can be found in Googles help response:
"Certain actions such as buying or selling links to increase a site's PageRank value ... can result in penalization."
Notice that the buyer can also be affected - as my site has. Buyer beware.
But hey, they hold the power and can do whatever they want these days. Very scary indeed.
Hence, presentation is key. Write a low-key presentation with Brett's wink-wink approach and you can fall below G's radar.
I think you're selling the potential link broker/site owner short. One of the top factors is WHO you link to.
1. Are they relevant to your users? I mean, could it be considered relevant by any means? Same language, etc?
2. Does the linkee have blatent penalty worthy optimization?
3. Is it spamming the index? (One pr9 site of ours got 1,230,000 pages of affiliate crap indexed on a site that bought a link from us before their site even received toolbar PR. Luckily we did a follow-up site: check since they changed it after our initial investigation.
Another factor I believe plays into the life-span of "sponsored links" sites (we've discussed this somewhat before) is whether or not the site needs that money to survive (from a 2 minute once-over); to continue providing a useful resource. An obviously non-prof site might have a better chance at survival.
Also, sites buying the bulk of their PR and then also selling PR may be at higher risk.
Despite all that, it is of course intelligent to word things eloquently.
It may even be advisable to find buyers elsewhere than directly from your site and to have a "more info" link near the sponsored links that states that you do not sell links and that the owners of the listed sites have contributed something.
Not only the seller but now also the buyer of the links can get his site penalised.
Once again...I'm off to buy some links to point to my competitors. If this can actually be proven across multiple/unrelated domains, just think of all the interesting website "hitmen" that will spring up.
As I've said before...the only way for google to deal with this kind of abuse is to block the site selling the links from passing PR (which I think is what happened in the above case, your PR4 could have dropped for any number of other reasons). Anything else, including penailizing a site for INBOUND links opens the door for rampant sabotage.
...at least that's what I heard from some guy I know ;)
Of course, I'll never know for certain. What I can say is, looking at the site in detail, it was so damn obvious what was going on that google could have zapped it quite happily with a clear conscience that it wasn't a "setup" job by a competitor.
In general principles, there are always shades of grey, but in a black and white case, I don't see why not.
Of course if a site only has inbound links which are purchased, and the sites doing the link selling get PR0'd it will amount to the same thing - the site has no inbound links counting towards rankings any more. It will also be PR0.
Generally though, a PR0 site which has pages in the index is simply suffering from a lack of inbound links (or discounted links from PR0'd sites).
A suddenly PR0'd site with no pages in the index (down from thousands) is usually suffering from a manual penalty.
TJ
Problems occur when multi-page links or site-wide links are gained and the majority of links are from sources that Google has tagged as PR sellers.
So, if mydomain.com has links pointing in from sources that are all known by Google as PR/link sellers - but very few from other sites, then that trips the switch - penalty.
That's my theory, and it is all I can see that fits my sites symptoms.
TJ
Of course if a site only has inbound links which are purchased, and the sites doing the link selling get PR0'd it will amount to the same thing - the site has no inbound links counting towards rankings any more. It will also be PR0.
My point exactly. All google needs to do (and has done, on several occasions now) is block the domain sleling links from passing any PR. If a site has a good linking strategy, then it wouldn't TOO bad of an effect. If, instead, all they had were purchased links, then the effect would be a severe penalty - without taking a chance that they were being "setup".
A suddenly PR0'd site with no pages in the index (down from thousands) is usually suffering from a manual penalty.
I think there is recent evidence to the contrary.
[webmasterworld.com...]
...if you are selling "text links" and you have high PR which you didn't get "naturally" then you are toast.
Of course google decides what "naturally" means.
As a percipient of the google no PR passing penalty on a couple sites and being ripped off for $1000's from the king of unscrupulous text link brokers my days of ever selling text links are over, even though I still could.
Some advice to anybody who is doing it is to DOUBLE check the people you are advertising. There are a lot of people from very bad neighbourhoods trying to buy links and your site you've spent years building could quickly end up lumped in with the bad neighbourhood crowd. Many text link brokers DO NOT vet their clients and don't give a rats ass if your site gets banned. Some advertisers also try swapping the content of the sites you advertise after you have approved them, something to watch out for!
