Matt Cutts Confirms Paid Links & Google PageRank Update

Matt Cutts emailed Search Engine Journal last night

"The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank."

 

thx for the link. checking it now.

 

thxs for the llink

 

Thanks for the link, i thought for a moment that MC had lost some weight himself but realised thats not him in the pic.

Reading now.

Edit: Tell google you dont want any parerank, then they cant accuse you of selling it.

 

So what does PageRank effect?

 

Visual pagerank? Not a lot. Wouldn't worry about it.

 

Thanks for the article link, it confirmed the obvious.

 

This was already confirmed by danny sullivan almost a month ago as my reader shows I even stared it.

 

I am confused... Matt Cutt's emailed this story to this blog?
And this blog wasn't penalized? It appears that all the advice given on this blog is blatantly not used by the blog (unless I am mistaken, which I could be), but it appears to me that there are at least a dozen PR passing text links here... am I wrong??

 

dozen yes you are wrong then, links on the right are links they have added them selves not SOLD, links on the right that lead to directories, now those are questionable as they are friends with v7n, and jeff those might and might not have been sold, but they are in nofollow anyways

 

yah... that's what bugs me about all of this... there is very fine line between.. "these are links I added myself because I like the sites" and "I like this site because they have given me money"...

They're not all nofollow.. only some...(edit: Just looked again.. I guess the one's that aren't nofollow just link back to the site)

I just think that if G is going to have a rule it needs to be black and white...There is way to much grey area in this visible PR update..

 

Everyone seems confused, even Google...lowering the page rank of certain sites is supposed to mean that Google's opinion of these sites has went down? But not enough to change the SERP's? Now that makes no sense and actually shines a bright light on the 'catch 22' Google is in, if they penalize these sites in the SERPs for selling links then it will hurt their search results even more....

 

You make an excellent point about the catch 22 G has put themselves in. It does seem as though a lot of people are reporting a decrease in PR no one is really being affected by SERPS (yet).

I am also reading of a lot of people submitting through Webmaster tools and getting their PR back. But what's the point if they aren't selling links and PR doesn't affect SERP's???

 

Where are you reading this, can you provide a link?

 

In the comments on the post of the original link in this thread

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/matt-cutts-confirms-paid-links-google-pagerank-update/5906/

There is also a followup story on this blog suggesting it..

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/...-requesting-reconsideration-from-google/5909/

 

According to this definition, yes.

 

By Google's definitnion it has a lower opinion of those sites and therefore has reduced the visual PR to reflect this....makes little sense but as I said above Gooogle has a bit of a conundrum.

Here is my comment post on that article:

I think Google will be dropping visual PR...they have rendered it meanlingless anyways with this latest 'opinion' based drops.

 

I love this quote:

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

So even if you appear, to Google, to be selling or buying links you are at risk. Any link to any other site could appear that way I guess.

The only way around it would be if every link to every site from every website used the Nofollow but that's would seem to render PR useless. This may be Google's intent but way not just simple do away with PR which is the root of all this.

 

will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

That is just a scare tactic, if Google starts penalizing sites they 'think', 'might' be selling links then they are going to end up penalizing half the web and the other half will drop like a rock from being linked to the first half....so I doubt they are dumb enough to do that.