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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?
I think the only way Google could penalise is that if they thought that the site was delibaratly making money off selling PR, the fact that the page might be a PR9 doesn't matter if they don't make any reference to any boost in Google.
Banning sites that sell text ads would be insane. They are the most effective and least annoying ads on the web.
I think a possible penalty might only come into effect if they were actually advertising selling PR. Believe it or not, some people may buy text ads for the actual traffic that they generate.
Whether you advertise it as being page rank for sale or not it's still the same thing.
Do you think google is turning a blind eye as long as it's not advertised as such, even though anyone with half a brain would know this is the case.
You'd be pretty stupid to buy any kind of ad on a site completely unrelated to the topic of your website
What if the demographic of the visitor to that site is one I am targeting? Does it still make it stupid?
Anyway, a lot of the highest traffic pages happen to also have a nice PR. It would be nearly impossible for Google to determine whether these sites were selling ads for solely PR or not.
The "ads" are text links. They are displayed in such a way that a visitor "could" see them, but in all probability never will actually read and click through them.
I don't think this has been going on that for long - less than 6 mos. Maybe only a couple of months. I could be wrong though.
I agree that this has been done to sell the links for PR boost purposes. As long as they keep a low-profile about it, Google may leave them alone.
But the fact that we are discussing it here raises the profile a bit doesn't it?
The implications are that as long as a site is reasonably well optimised you'll essentially be able to buy your way to the top of the SERP's.
As has been mentioned in this thread, in a lot of cases it is quite difficult to know for sure whether unrelevant text links have been bought just for pagerank purposes or not, which is why it makes it difficult for google to anything about it.
I don't believe anyone would say, "you bought that banner with the double redirect to improve pagerank!"
And, I doubt that Google would even care. But - if the link happened to pass on pagerank - then hey, you just got an extra bonus.
Bottom line is - does the site offer the visitor what they thought ti might from the title / description?
If so, then user happy - got relevant site - site happy, got happy visitor - Google happy, made surfer's day & sold relevant advertising during the process.
Maybe surfer clicks on adwords too...but finds what they need in the serps, or perhaps finds what they need in adwords. Either way, as long as the punter is happy with what they found, Google is doing a job good enough to keep the user coming back for more.
As for trying to curb the 'advertising' process of buying media -> because people expect to get an ROI for the buying of the links, there isn't anything Google can do.
And, imho, they probably don't care to. As long as the surfer gets what they want - everybody wins. :)
Even if they get what they wanted - from your competitor. lol.
But, google obviously does care about it to some degree or the PR for sale website wouldn't still be PR0.
If I were in charge at Google, I would not remove PageRank, but not allow users to see it in the toolbar or Google directory. Not knowing what people have would cripple this pagerank selling. But PageRank would still be a strong factor in the Google algo.
And, what if those had a simple redirect that Google could follow, their site was high pagerank, etc.
Would it be fair to ban them because they are hurting, and started selling ads more & more people wanted to buy?
I hardly think so.
So, if there is no redirect involved, and it's a straight text link but sold on a monthly basis, is that wrong?
Same site, same story - only straight links, instead of redirects? Should Google ban them, because abviously, "they are selling pagerank"?
How does Google know what's going on in their mind? Unless they advertise it, Google has no way of knowing if the link was bought / sold for PageRank purposes, or simply because somebody thought it was a very good media buy.
Now we are getting into mind reading here...and I think it's a bit disturbing. Sure, if somebody is manipulating the cr*p out of Google, the deserve to get their site kicked out & buried.
But - if they are just selling ads why bother penalizing them? And if the side effect is that one of the sites that bought an ad starts to rank higher in Google it is a bit logical that the site is a good choice for whatever they sell.
Why? Because
1) they spent money on marketing, and logically, they can't afford marketing if they ain't makin' money
2) odds are, they have a site that people are interseted in - how many firms are willing to sell ads to lousy sites? it hurts their image to be associated with lower quality, so odds are, they won't.
Google is very focused on doing what they do best. I can't remember (as a surfer) the last time I thougth, "gee, I just can't find what I"m looking for..."
And Google has the answer for anybody that can't figure out how to get enough traffic to sell people: adwords, and sponsorships. If you are in business, and selling something, every sale will cost you soemthing to obtain.
Figure out how much time you invested in 'free traffic' and who knows? It might be more worth your while to buy advertising on other sites, instead of optimizing, or buy adwords. :)
In the end they probably will. I don't think they can keep carpet bombing like they have done before. At some point the collateral damage will come back and bite Google if they keep doing it.
But if they get rid of all the PR indicators then they need to also get rid of the penalty for linking to a PR0 site. Because how can anybody tell?
SearchKing was different. They made a point of selling the link for PageRank purposes.
Google can't stop every trick out there. They know that. They just need to keep up the impression of integrity. They do that but crushing the visible spammers. The invisibles can stay that way as long as most of the internet public has confidence in the integrity of Google's results.
Besides, the industry's most likely to buy PR links are highly commercial anyway. Finding information is less likely to be what the user is looking for.
As long as your incoming link text and PageRank are equivalent to your competition then you can claw your way to the top of the SERPs through on page keyword repetition. These factors are each just part of the whole.
Of course buying and selling links can help a site's position in an engine that places some emphasis on link text and PageRank, but that doesn't make it a safe easy way to get #1. Quite the contrary; I remember a chap I helped back in 2001 who suffered terribly until he took my advice and removed the text link adverts.
Neither he nor his customers benefited from the arrangement, which lost him PR across his network for over a year. Caveat emptor...
Google created the value of pagerank this website is using your creation for commercial purposes without deterioating the SERP's.
I know if I had a PR9 website, I'd be selling text links at $2000 a month if I could.
All google has to do is drop them by -2PR. (9 to 7, or 8 to 6). It wouldn't make much of a difference at all for them if they don't care about PR. It would not be detremental to their site. PR6 or PR7 is still very respectable. But it would impact their PR for sale business tremendously.
[edited by: NFFC at 8:24 pm (utc) on Feb. 18, 2003]
[edit reason] De-duped [/edit]
This is a fair point. One can make a pretty good argument that the Yahoo! directory today is largely PageRank for sale.
It would be pretty hard to sell text links from a PR8 or 7 site if your potential buyers couldn't see what your PR was.
Just an extension of the idea in my previous post. Not even sure I really believe in it. Just an idea. I would hate to see Google take worse drastic steps at curbing this problem so I am looking for a compromise.
hmm...I take it Google isn't your favorite search engine then? :)
From where I'm sitting, I love their results. Looking at my logs, apparently, so do lots of other people (else they wouldn't have found my site there...he he)
As far as I know, Google has the largest market share of queries / day...perhaps other people aren't convinced of the benefits of using off page stuff to rank a page, but -> the punters seem to like the results.
How much free press does Altavista or Fast, or WiseNut for that matter, get? Not much, to go by what people post here with respect to citing other shows / stories / magazines / news papers, etc.
Getting back to the topic, sure - Google could try and go through and pick out every site by hand. However, their goal is to provide the best results in the world ( i think ) for the people that use it to find what they're looking for.
I can't remember the last time a friend who doesn't know how search engines work said, "Google sucks. I can't find anything" :)
