site penalized?

[Contrid]

Good day,

Someone contacted me through my website's contact form asking if I wanted to in the manner of getting a product review and gave me all the details. I went to look at the site. It has 20,000+ backlinks on the domain, the age was 4 years plus and the Alexa rank is 105,000. So everything looks great and the site gets loads of traffic. One problem though, I see that the site has PR 0. No PR at all!

I contacted the owner again and asked why the PR was 0 and his response was...

simple, Google has penalized me 1.5 year ago, but only on page rank. my traffic is normal. I don't know the reason, maybe because I sold text link via Text-Link-Ads.com or paidreview via Payperpost.
com. Google hates these two sites.

Apart from the traffic which will be good and probably worth the money, do you think it is good to get a dofollow link from that site even if it has been penalized? Will Google reduce my rankings for getting a link from a site like this? I'm assuming not but its worth asking.

All the best,
Antonie

[seoofindia.com]

I think you should avoid to get the links from that site. Fair play is best practice. It is completely my recommendation, I don't know is there any strong background regarding SEO.

[seriocomic]

Well it depends on what you are expecting to get from this linking arrangement.

If you want click-through traffic and their site is getting a lot of traffic to the page your link will appear on, then sure...

If you want to rank higher for some particular keywords, then I wouldn't. If they've been penalized before then Google doesn't trust the links from them, and you wouldn't get any PR benefit.

[Contrid]

Actually I was thinking about the traffic and not specifically trying to get a backlink. The publisher showed me stats and I did some research and for the price it seems worth it.

[australiaseo]

"Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they're likely to have no positive impact on your site's performance over time. If your site's visibility in Google index is important to you it's best to avoid them." ~Google. So you the problem is cleared you can go for it because you are not trying for the links point specified by Google.

[BB-OM]

Link buying and selling has long been disapproved by Google. Remember johnchow.com being banned for "john chow" keyword?