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I’ve just spent about 2 hours reading Matt Cutt’s (MC) blog where there is a lengthy discussion with over 500 comments on a post about selling links that pass PageRank. Here are some answers – straight from Matt’s replies – on various questions that have been floating around the internet since the Google PageRank slap in October.

1. Q: What about AdWords selling PageRank?
   MC: …the AdWords folks have disabled ads for many queries such as “pagerank 8″ that would have shown ads before. I expect that we’ll probably disable ads for more “buy PageRank”-type queries as well.

2. Q: Can’t Google just figure out which blogs are low quality and remove them from the index/stop them passing weight?
   MC: Google does reserve the right to take action to protect the quality of our index. In general, that can include removing the ability of a site to pass PageRank, decreasing the PageRank in the Google toolbar to show that we have less trust in the page/site, all the way up to demoting or removing pages or sites that are sufficiently spammy…

3. Q: What about paid directories like Yahoo! or any of the 1000’s of smaller ones? Would Google consider paid directories the same as selling links that pass pagerank?
   MC: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:

   - Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
   - What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
   - If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

4. Q: Is Google trying to crack down on other forms of advertisements used to drive traffic?
   MC: A: No, not at all. Our webmaster guidelines clearly state that you can use links as means to get targeted traffic. In fact, in the presentation I did in August 2007, I specifically called out several examples of non-Google advertising that are completely within our guidelines. We just want disclosure to search engines of paid links so that the paid links won’t affect search engines.

5. Q: What recourse does a site owner have if their site was selling links that pass PageRank, and the site’s PageRank in the Google toolbar was lowered?
   MC: The site owner can address the violations of the webmaster guidelines and submit a reconsideration request in Google’s Webmaster Central console. Before doing a reconsideration request, please make sure that all sold links either do not pass PageRank or are removed.

6. Q: Why can’t each site label all of their ads? If they did, there would be no need at all for a nofollow tag, right?
   MC:… nofollow should be used as a “machine readable disclosure”. i.e. disclosure in text to humans is not good enough.

Although some answers were provided, there were many other burning questions that were left unanswered, among them:

1. How come text-link-ads.com still has a PR7 AND indexed?

2. When did Google EVER profess to supply accurate information V.S. most relevant according to its algorithm?

3. Arrington does paid posts and lists sponsors with links not using nofollow. He doesn’t get get slapped down.

I would be really interested to see Matt answer these questions instead of skipping them.