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Buying pr

is it an acceptable practice

         

nervous_seo

6:50 pm on Jan 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



There is a website out there that is selling text links and all the link recipients websites have been boosted to PR8's and 9's.

The recipient sites are now dominating the SERPS as a result <snip>. Whats worse is that out of the few companies that are dominating the serps 5 or 6 are owned by the same person/company. All pretty much with duplicate content(different templates).

This site selling text links will sell link to anyone provided they pay in excess of $4000 per month.

They dont "SELL" PR like search king did but its obvious what they are doing.

Is this an acceptable practice these days?

[edited by: NFFC at 7:09 pm (utc) on Jan. 28, 2003]
[edit reason] No specifics please [/edit]

fathom

10:15 pm on Jan 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Just a final thought for nervous_seo. PageRank without the 99 other ingredients which produces top ranked positions will not help you.

You will go broke long before you ever achieved your goals. One link (for $4,000) does not fix a web site (a thousand of these would help though @ 4 million).

In addition, anyone with "free" (normally obtained) links and a learning curve of knowledge will surpass Paid-for PageRank every time.

[edited by: fathom at 10:16 pm (utc) on Jan. 28, 2003]

Clark

10:16 pm on Jan 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Interesting question. I know of a PR9 site that sells a bunch of random text links and it's obvious what the KWs being targetted are and guess what, they come up number one for their terms. It costs quite a bit less than the figure mentioned above.

On the other hand, they get millions of unique visitors per day. They never mention PR although you'd have to be a fool to think they are unaware of it.

The way they market their ad is to refer to their millions of visitors.

Are they doing anything wrong? Why shouldn't they sell their ads? Why should they be penalized? I don't know, but I am curious if Google find a problem with this, and if they find it, would they penalize the PR9 site or the advertisers or both?

Also, I imagine it's pretty hard for a PR9 site with millions of visitors to hide from Google for long...especially since the ads are in very competitive categories, so you'd think Google got spam reports already and ignored it....

Total Paranoia

10:21 pm on Jan 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I guess the question is - Is this artificially inflating PageRank? I would say No. It is really not too different than paying to be included on Yahoo and if I found a paid directory that would be useful to my type of business I would add a link, with little thought on PR. I would say most people would.

born2drv

11:28 pm on Jan 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



With all due respect to Brett, webmasterworld is only PR7 (and I'm only PR6). So if I was Google I wouldn't worry too much about the pagerank that can be passed with his website. There's got to be like 50,000+ PR7 pages out there.

What I'm talking about is Google keeping a database of just PR9-10 pages (there can't be more than 1,000 or so, right?) and running tests on them to see how many have external outbound links to other sites.... assume 10% do. You telling me they can't check 100 or so pages by hand every once in a while to make sure there is no fishy page rank sales going on? And that's assuming no one snitches you out and files a spam report telling google there is some page rank buying go on at pr10site.com

Sure they can. That's why I don't think I would ever buy text links on a PR9-10 site... too risky. Maybe a PR7-8 because there are too many to check. If I had enough links from these sites, I could get PR7-8 myself and be much more inconsipcious.

danny

12:05 am on Jan 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



You don't need a PR 9 page to sell pagerank influencing ads - links on 1000 PR 5 pages (a discussion forum or an archive, for example) will also be quite effective.

But US$4000/month seems insane.

mfishy

12:25 am on Jan 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



My example of Brett's link to WestHost was just to point out that any link can be bought or natural and no one can really tell for sure (I realize this is not but it was the most readily available too look at).

People here talk about trading for links and bartering all the time. There really is little difference between this and flat out paying. Either way it's manipulating PR and it ain't free (unless you consider your time and website real estate worthless).

mfishy

12:34 am on Jan 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



If Google wanted to penalize or not count text links they certainly could start with not counting Yahoo links. These are bought and the results are very spammy.

fathom

12:54 am on Jan 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



You don't need a PR 9 page to sell pagerank influencing ads - links on 1000 PR 5 pages (a discussion forum or an archive, for example) will also be quite effective.

EXACTLY! ...and moreso.

1 PR9 link has 1 anchor.

1000 PR5 links have 1000 anchors, and out performing PageRank if mostly from 1000 unique sites. This develops off-page relevancy to the on-topic theme.

In addition, 1000 links is much more credible (not saying a PR9 page isn't credible - it is). It's far more difficult to manipulate 1000 links from other sites than one - and one reason why a PR5 page can beat a PR7 page in SERPs.

europeforvisitors

1:39 am on Jan 29, 2003 (gmt 0)



Nervous_seo spoke about a site that "sells" links for $4k without any further info. I guess, they don't sell ONE link but many links...

Well, if they sell too many links, the PR of their outbound links will be diluted--and the suckers who bought in early are going to be awfully annoyed. :-)

fathom

1:46 am on Jan 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



and the suckers who bought in early are going to be awfully annoyed

;) :) :(

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