Sites selling text links see PageRank drop

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Google PageRank

This is bad news for blogs making money selling text links. According to reports, Google is dropping PageRanks of sites which are selling paid text link ads without using nofollow. It is also penalizing sites that write sponsored posts.

The current PageRank delay in update had led to speculation that Google might be doing away with PageRank altogether because of the abuse and manipulation of ranking through practices including selling links. However, it is now clear that Google has instead taken drastic steps to clean up PageRank manipulation.

While Google is not against text link advertising, they do not want sites passing link juice to advertisers. Matt Cutt’s comment on this issue:

You want my links for traffic.. totally fine..just don’t make it so they affect search engines..so that’s why we say use nofollow..or use a redirect which is through robots.txt

Paid links that affect search engines (whether paid text links or a paid review) can cause a site to lose trust in Google.

More high and low ranking sites throughout the blogosphere, including John Chow have reported seeing a drop in PageRank recently now that updating is indeed being carried out. There is a PageRank bloodbath happening.

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Tags: google pagerank

Comments

4 Responses to “Sites selling text links see PageRank drop”

More PageRank Downgrades » Earn Money Online with Some Useless Info on October 26th, 2007 10:35 am

[…] Sites selling text links see PageRank drop […]
Blogosphere Thoughts On PageRank Downgrade » Earn Money Online with Some Useless Info on October 29th, 2007 9:46 am

[…] Sites selling text links see PageRank drop […]
Steven Smith : Google PageRank Deductions on October 30th, 2007 5:03 am

[…] There’s a great deal of discussion going on this month about recent deductions Google has made to Toolbar PageRank (not real PageRank) in October 2007. ASPAlliance.com, a well-respected developer site (IMHO) with a ton of content, was dropped from a TBPR of 7 earlier this month (which it’s had forever) down to a 4 (ouch!). Apparently this is shared by Forbes.com - hardly nefarious black-hat sites here. Based on a variety of sources, the issue seems to be that the site has a few sponsored links to relevant related content, such as ASP.NET shopping cart and charting controls and web hosting. Sadly, Google is strong-arming publishers into compliance with this action, which for ASPAlliance at least will require us to cease using sponsored links as a means to support the site (which actually spends more on hosting and content than it makes in advertising, most months). The nice thing about these text links, for our users, is that they were not as imposing as many of the larger ad formats. […]
Joining The DoFollow Club | Some Useless Info on August 3rd, 2008 8:54 pm

[…] engines here and here which let you search for dofollow blogs so that you can build up a list of inbound links to your […]