Page Rank For Sale

[aek]

I found out recently that a fairly high profile website (PR9) is selling site wide text links at $2000 per month. All the websites with links are now PR8 or 9 as a result.

It looks as if there are the same 20 paid links on all pages, so I'd estimate they are pulling in about $200000 a month from this.

I'd imagine google knows about this by now and has decided not to penalise for this. Since the Searchking lawsuit perhaps google has decided to back off on link penalties for fear of the legalities of doing so.

Due to it's pagerank income whether rightly or wrongly, this website would certainly have the financial clout to sue them, as penalising this website would have a massive financial effect.

Could this open the door to websites blatantly selling pagerank?

[rogerd]

Not to upset your applecart, Shurlee, but the discussion points up a flaw in the PageRank portion of the algo that Google will have to address in the same way they addressed link farms. Since it's a lot harder to ferret out paid links bought for PR purposes, they probably won't be able to surgically excise those listings. Rather, a reduction of the impact of PR and/or use of topically themed PR are probably coming. It's like any other ranking algo. If Google initially discovered that sites with purple backgrounds were more relevant, they would build that into their algo. Once SEOs discovered they could boost their rankings with purple backgrounds, though, sites with that color would proliferate and Google would have to move on to the next algorithm design.

[darkroom]

hi aek..i have also seen a similar site asking for 2000 per link...

[vitaplease]

If Google really wanted to, they could do something about it.

I mean how many PR9 pages are around?

How many of them have off-topic outbound links mainly on the site's highest Pageranked pages?
How many pages make a jump from PR4 to PR8 in one update?

I guess for the moment they think the general public is not being disturbed by its effect.

I think Google has left aside certain very competitive search niche markets, to let the players beat each other to death, one way or the other. When it carries over to the main search they interfere.

[SlyOldDog]

Isn't a real life analogy of paying for pagerank just paying a famous person to endorse a product?

That's not frowned upon, so why should a sponsored link be?

[vitaplease]

SlyOldDog, in a way you are right.

The problem lies with Google's own definition:

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank

From: [google.com...]

>>just paying a famous person to endorse a product?

at least the general public sees where that comes from and that it is paid for..

(I had to look up "endorse" in dictionary.com)
endorse: To give approval of or support to, especially by public statement

Not that I'm debating the "importance" and "high-quality" of what money can buy..

[jamsy]

anyone care to stick me the url of this pr9 site please

[coldincanada]

I've also heard of this but have never been able to find any sites doing this. I also would appreciate a sticky if anybody has specific names.

[przero2]

so what had happened to this PR9 site ... are they still selling text links

[Yidaki]

IMHO sites that "sell their page rank" by selling some links on their pages is of no importance for the whole game. Unless a site doesn't build it's whole business on selling "high pr links" they'll don't disturb the results and shouldn't bother google at all. *A few* sites *may* rise to #1 because of a sposored link from a high pr site ... so what?

And, btw: the big players (prob accidentally) transformed the business themselfs. Today the price of a link is measured by the pr (not only google's pr!) of the linking page - ancient times ago the price was measured by the traffic of the linking sites. In ancient times the site owners sold links because they had a lot of (often unqualified) traffic ... google generates most of most site's traffic - so the currency is different today.