There has obviously been some sort of filtering by google not on our links out, but our links in. Has anybody else had experiences of this?

So say I sell a text link on my site to another website because I’ve got a PR7, and Google finds out about my doing so, they will just stop counting any links like this toward search engine results?

That’s about it, based on the public comments we’ve seen. Of course, it’s likely that *all* of the links out from your site would no longer be trusted, not just the ads.

Sorry to keep asking questions. I’m just trying to get on the right page since I was way off with my first couple comments.

You’re misunderstanding the situation. Google won’t drop your site or anything like that. All they’ll do is stop counting the links pointing out of it.

I couldn’t tell you what their internal process would be to identify sites, but it’s not hard to spot sites that are selling links.

Thanks for the reply. I see your point. I guess it’s like anything else. Google has rules and if you don’t follow them then you don’t get listed on their SE. How would Google every really find out I’m selling links anyway unless I openly made it known what I was up to?

Nobody’s getting punished, unless you think Google owes you a living in the first place. If you sell text links, fine. If Google decides not to count the links you sold in generating search results, that’s their business.

The link rental “industry” that was thriving a year ago is not going to last forever, operating the same way. That doesn’t mean people won’t buy links. I buy advertising all the time.

I saw a post where someone asked something like “does google really owe you a living?” Well no they don’t, but if they are going to set the rules for getting ranked high, don’t punish someone from your search engine becuase they found a loophole…I mean hell they are still making billions of dollars, who cares right?

I’ll admit I don’t know a great deal about SEO and PR and such, so if I’m way off base here, someone let me know and please explain why.

Thanks

Of course we all know the biggest seller of text links, a little company called Yahoo. They charge $300 yearly for a link from a decent PR ontopic directory page.

The difference, of course, is that Yahoo does an editorial review of submitted sites, uses the name of the company as the ‘anchor text,’ and links to a substantial number of sites that have not paid for a review – even in commercial categories.

There are a lot of directories that don’t have the editorial standards of Yahoo. Many of these have been subject to an editorial review by Google, so that their links are no more trusted than the paid ads on O’Reilly’s network.

paying someone to advertising your site via a link has been around pretty much as long as link exchanges.

Indeed, and anyone is free to make their own advertising decisions. Still, as a user of search engines, I’m very happy to see them taking steps to reduce the influence paid links have in search results.

A lot of the text link ads that you see across the web perform perfectly well as advertising. If you’re depending on a search engine ranking boost to justify the expense of paid advertising, you may find that your money doesn’t go as far as it used to… and that’s a good thing for the web.