Official: Link Selling Hurts PageRank & Ranking in Google

[Matt Mickiewicz]

Danny Sullivan has confirmed with Google that they are now penalizing sites which sell links by decreasing their pagerank and/or rankings.

Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well.

Previously, those caught selling links, simply had their site stop passing PageRank.

[hairybob]

Thanks for that confirmation Matt. It's about time in my opinion. Some of those link farm sites are nothing more than spam.

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=505614

There is a good article referenced in the above post that also goes into quite a bit of detail to help people understand the difference between link farms and quality directories (which they may also have to pay to be indexed in).

[samanime]

That's great news. It just makes it that much easier for us that play fair to get a better rank.

[gregjarvis]

Originally Posted by samanime

That's great news. It just makes it that much easier for us that play fair to get a better rank.

Definitely. Even out the playing field a little bit more.

[stymiee]

Originally Posted by jimbo_dk

Does the site being linked to get penalized in all of this?

No. If this were the case it would be easy to hurt your competitors.

Originally Posted by SEO Canada

I'm with Danny Sullivan: you're not going to be able to find all the text link ad sellers, so why do it?

They don't have to get all of them. They just need to reduce the manipulation of the rankings as much as they can. The more they eliminate, the better their results will be.

Originally Posted by redhex

Does it means that links directory, classifieds sites and general listings sites will be penalised?

It is getting really grey here. Some sites have to get payment for listing links to counter spam and lousy submission. Now things are getting screwed.

The basic rule is why are the links being bought and sold. If the purpose is to get PR and manipulate the SERPs it's a bad thing. Sites that have an editorial review and block PR from being passed will be fine. Others that just accept payment and don't screen content run the risk of being considered selling links for the manipulation of the SERPs.

[usachrisk]

Isn't this a part of doing business? Not flooding a page with links, but accepting advertisers for like-content? If I'm running a website for cars, should I be allowed to sell advertising space to Autozone?

Or am I overthinking this?

[subnet_rx]

Originally Posted by usachrisk

Isn't this a part of doing business? Not flooding a page with links, but accepting advertisers for like-content? If I'm running a website for cars, should I be allowed to sell advertising space to Autozone?

Or am I overthinking this?

Actually, from what I read, it's about passing PR. If you add nofollow, you can sell all the links you want. I do worry about how they are detecting this. I was reading that they are trying to penalize for paid reviews without nofollow. My question is, is there objective to completely take backlinks out of the picture? Something they were built on?

[john2k]

My bad, I forgot that it's only okay to sell advertising links online via Google Adsense.

[stymiee]

Originally Posted by john2k

My bad, I forgot that it's only okay to sell advertising links online via Google Adsense.

You've missed the point. They're not against selling ads or links. They're against selling links to manipulate their rankings. Big difference.

[sirronstuff]

Originally Posted by stymiee

You've missed the point. They're not against selling ads or links. They're against selling links to manipulate their rankings. Big difference.

but isn't that what happens with google adsense? I see sites get credit for backlinks with adsense all the time unless I am mistaken. Are they going to no follow their own links?

BTW, I do see a need to prevent abuse, but I do find it somewhat amusing. Luckily, my industry does not seem to be abusing the system in this way.

[hooperman]

Originally Posted by sirronstuff

but isn't that what happens with google adsense? I see sites get credit for backlinks with adsense all the time unless I am mistaken. Are they going to no follow their own links?

Search engines can't follow adsense links because they're embedded in javascript. They give no link benefit.

[|hosting_alien|]

Originally Posted by stymiee

You've missed the point. They're not against selling ads or links. They're against selling links to manipulate their rankings. Big difference.

well to get some things right in my head.. getting links is getting customers.. and what is getting rankings in google in our days? My answer would be getting customers. Selling links is one thing. I'd vote its ok if you are within some reasonable borders, and as long the site have some advertising scheme and it is of the same content.

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[mrlost]

You don't get it. They have nothing against selling links or advertising. They just don't want people doing it to manipulate their SERPs. All you need to do is add nofollow to your links and you're all set. If you refuse to do it then they have every right to penalize your site for violating their terms of service. You don't have to play by their rules but they also don't have to include you in their index.

I get it. Just too much of it. They're definitely not the same Google they used to be. And, if they're not going to let me sell links, I'm not going to display their adsense links on my site. On my directory pages, they display a blank PR, not white. This is an indication of a penalty, so they are essentially telling potential advertisers that there may be consequences if they buy a link on my site. I would call that more then just penalizing a site, and they should actually not be allowed to display any information regarding pagerank. PR by Google is like traffic rankings according to Alexa... to say the least, very misleading.

Don't post rules, and then change them. I do not run a link farm. I don't spam. I've used their rules. I do not believe they're going to have better search results because of this move. Most people who come to my site enter through the home page, or one of the articles, and end up at the directory. I really don't think they're interested in a level playing field and better search results.

In fact, it's fairly obvious that their results will be poorer and infested with more advanced SEO techniques such as hiding paid links in content, and probably much more to come. And when they can't tell the difference, they just use the shotgun technique of taking everybody down, regardless of whether it's intentional or not. So, here you have good content banned, obvious spammers banned, and the clever spammers merrily controlling the top of the SERPS. Brilliant! Now that's how to produce quality results. uh-huh.

The idea of "squealing" on sites with paid links is beyond belief. And some SEO's are using that technique as part of their strategy, and even feel they'd be remiss for not doing this for their clients. I can understand when a site is hooked up to a bunch of link farms, but it's not just link farms that are getting damaged (as they should). It's "paid links". And, they expect you to insert a Google specific code into all your links. That's not part of web design. I'll put a Google specific code on my site: Google: no follow. I'd rather shoot myself in the foot then support an entity whose main goal now is to please shareholders, not by serving the web, but by controlling it.

I have no intention of selling links for the purposes of clients getting higher PR in Google. In fact, I think the whole PR thing is a just short of a hoax at this point. I still hold that if they don't want it manipulated, don't display it. Millions of PR5+ sites got there through manipulation that they would not have bothered with had Google never displayed or mentioned pagerank. And, I believe Google is doing a very poor job of controlling it. Use it in the algorithms, remove it from the public domain.

[dave owen]

Although I'm very happy about this on the whole, I am also concerned about it.

- I once had a high-quality site that relied on legitimate sponsors. Effectively I was selling them links. To be penalised for what I was doing would be grossly unfair.
- There is no way to automatically detect paid links with any accuracy. I don't care what Google says, I believe I can prove my point. I certainly don't buy the argument that "irrelevant" links can be identified as paid. That's BS.
- Isn't Adsense all about selling links?

If Google plans to automate this type of penalty there will be a lot a collateral damage. Many innocent sites will suffer.

[Waraas]

Originally Posted by dave owen

- There is no way to automatically detect paid links with any accuracy. I don't care what Google says, I believe I can prove my point. I certainly don't buy the argument that "irrelevant" links can be identified as paid. That's BS.

right now they are manually editing sites pageranks.

[cpvr]

Originally Posted by Waraas

right now they are manually editing sites pageranks.

So all your sites that sell links will be edited?

[Waraas]

Originally Posted by cpvr

So all your sites that sell links will be edited?

working on that now. Just like aspen said, you cannot be lazy. I gotta make sure google dosent know im selling links. And i think text-link-ads out of the question now

[cpvr]

Originally Posted by Waraas

working on that now. Just like aspen said, you cannot be lazy. I gotta make sure google dosent know im selling links. And i think text-link-ads out of the question now

Let me know what you do.

[rcj662]

I wonder if they have looked at any of the sites selling links on all the forums yet. Someone should know by now if they are being penalized.

I think they look for sites advertising paid links to increase page rank.

[dvduval]

Yes, we have been seeing this in the directory industry as well. From what I can see, directories that charge for the review process have not suffered, and Matt Cutts has confirmed that this practice is fine. The sites that have suffered are the ones that are going around buying high pagerank links for the purpose of boosting the pagerank of their site, and there have been some adjustments to pagerank a few days ago to reflect this.

In the end, people need to focus on making a site that people love, and the rest will surely follow, but it may take a little more time.

[cranial-bore]

My bad, I forgot that it's only okay to sell advertising links online via Google Adsense.

Adsense links don't pass any PR, and don't affect the organic search results.
Sold text links without the nofollow attribute do affect these things. There's no hypocrisy from Google in that regard.

In fact given one of the ACCC's recent allegations against Google selling the top organic position Google may well need to ensure that the organic results are not affected by even third party commercial transactions.

[aspen]

The bottom line is you cannot be lazy if you're going to buy links, and you cannot be lazy if you want to sell links.

Spend the time to personally search out and contact relevant sites you want to purchase from, and insist they integrate your links into their content and not just cram them into the footer in an obvious way.

If you do that, you'll never get penalized because there is no way to differentiate your bought links from normal links.

If, however, you use a link brokerage service that is going to get your site on a public list. If you buy links from sites that sells dozens of them to all unrelated pages and crams your link between one for car insurance and one for male enhancement. If you're lazy and don't put any effort into finding quality sources to buy links (or quality advertisers to buy from you) and don't work to integrate those links in a believable and useful way. Then expect problems.

[dvduval]

Originally Posted by aspen

The bottom line is you cannot be lazy if you're going to buy links, and you cannot be lazy if you want to sell links.

Spend the time to personally search out and contact relevant sites you want to purchase from, and insist they integrate your links into their content and not just cram them into the footer in an obvious way.

If you do that, you'll never get penalized because there is no way to differentiate your bought links from normal links.

If, however, you use a link brokerage service that is going to get your site on a public list. If you buy links from sites that sells dozens of them to all unrelated pages and crams your link between one for car insurance and one for male enhancement. If you're lazy and don't put any effort into finding quality sources to buy links (or quality advertisers to buy from you) and don't work to integrate those links in a believable and useful way. Then expect problems.

Very well stated. I have bought links selectively myself, and it has always been on sites where I felt the link was appropriately places and was very reflective of the content on the site.

Also, knowing that google is being diligent about finding paid links, I have refrained from buying links through sites that sell many links on their pages, and make a business out of it.

I like to work with sites where the visitors will be good prospects anyway. So whether I am getting pagerank or not is not a big issue for me. What I need most is visitors. Rankings mean nothing if there are no visitors to go along with it.

[redhex]

Does it means that links directory, classifieds sites and general listings sites will be penalised?

It is getting really grey here. Some sites have to get payment for listing links to counter spam and lousy submission. Now things are getting screwed.

[jestep]

Originally Posted by redhex

Does it means that links directory, classifieds sites and general listings sites will be penalised?

It is getting really grey here. Some sites have to get payment for listing links to counter spam and lousy submission. Now things are getting screwed.

Google has been dropping link directories like crazy. There's quite a lot of information on it now. Take Aviva directory for example. Got very popular quickly, and was then dropped in google. Doesn't even rank for it's own name now. And, it's one of the best directories.