Wishful thinking: Should I sell links on my PR5 and PR6 sites?

I noticed some people here are selling links from their PR4/5/6 sites. I actually have 3-4 different sites that have PR5 and probably PR6 in the future based on PR prediction.

Should I jump into the bandwagon?

 

what is the theme of your sites?

 

All travel sites. Don't feel like posting the URL here though. It's just a thought. Seeing people taking in links even though not related to the sites, just for $x.xx/mo amount of money, not too bad eh?

 

It is really only worth it to me if the theme remains the same...

 

If you decide to go ahead with this, I would stick to only including links relevant to your sites content.

 

Correct. But I've seen people just sell out link space for any topics. Actually I'm not keen on selling though, it's just a thought.

 

I have, too and that is why I would suggest not doing it. It provides nothing useful for your site visitors and based on Matt Cutts recent article se's are really starting to look at these types of links negatively and it could prevent your site from being fully indexed.

 

It's not a bad thing. It will only effect you negativley if you are linking to irrelevant sites. Why not make a little extra money each month. Your only selling ad space.

 

That is exactly what I was saying. I agree.

 

I agree with Janet.
Unless the links you get are not relevant to your site, visitors on your site might quickly realise that the content is irrelevant and might drive the traffic away or they might not visit again.

 

anyone have any proof of negative impact for linking to irrelevant sites?

 

No proof on hand, but I can tell you it exists.

 

Go ahead and sell a few. Most people who will contact you will have related themed sites so you should have no problems about linking to irrelevant sites.
Make sure to mention the theme of your website when you post the offer.

 

Matt Cutts touches on the subject here.

 

Matt's views reminded me of a saying, "Never ask a barber if you need a hair cut or not..."

 

You've got some nice travelogues that I'm sure would be attractive to those promoting related sites.

 

Relevant linking is a huge portion of the Google algo. The whole conceptual basis for Google's algo is how research papers are written and what makes them more relevant and valuable. To Google, links are like references to other research papers. Thus, if in a paper you were to reference something completely irrelevant to the topic of the paper, your paper wouldn't be considered as relevent or important as papers that reference important papers. As a website, Google sees your site the same way and if you are linking to a lot of stuff that isn't relevant to the topic of your page/site then your page will not be seen as very relevant to Google.

 

I guess MattCutt was correct in that sense. Thus far, I inter-linked all my travel sites to each other, so almost all of them get, or will be getting PR5. Been thinking how to get these sites to PR6 or PR7, LOL.

Actually I also have a blog about Google Adsense articles written by me, it has a PR4 but I did not link it to any of my travel sites. Maybe I shouldn't.

 

On another note, I ran across this post on DP about somebody selling links from his/her PR7 site. Indeed, it is PR7 now, but the statistic doesn't look encouraging for going forward. See the iwebtool data below:

http://www.iwebtool.com/www.casselware.com/

The predicted PR will go down to 4? Maybe because of the new algorithm, because the website definitely doesn't have relevant links on the site. What do you guys think? The backlink number is awesome though, but only 2 pages indexed by Google?

 

If you do sell links do it discreetly. Google is really starting to get more aggressive on link selling, and it seems like they might even be penalizing sites who sell links by not having them pass any PR to other sites.

So if you don't want the value of your sites links to become worthless you need to do it carefully.