Can link sales effect Search rankings?

Over the past year I have sold 4 or so links on one of my entertainment niche websites and I was wondering at what point link sales effect your search rankings.

A lot of the traffic for this website comes from google so I don't want to ruin my ranks just for a few hundred dollars. Can anyone give me any info on this sort of thing? Does anyone have any personal experience with this?

Thanks in advance

 

In theory selling links will only affect your PageRank (making so more difficult to sell links, as it's an standard measure). However if Google thinks you are doing something illicit (in the way you are selling links, or including them), it could lead to any kind of penalty that could harm your positioning. Though, most likely, it won't.

 

IMHO it totally depends on the site you are getting linked from, good sites = good pr, bad sites (such as tagged by google as a bad neighbour, too many outbound links on the page your link is displayed etc) will have a negative effect

 

you shouldnt sell links, if google prooves it they will slap you so hard your site might never recover. It is against the T&C to buy links to help seo

 

When Google finds out you are selling links, your site will be reset to a PR 0. Now the links have no value.

Although Google does not have an aggressive program to find people that sell links, your competition will detect it quickly and report you to Google. At that point Google will take action.

 

I think that if google detect your link selling you will be panalted. I don't know about the PR, but it is possible to remove site from index which is very bad

 

Thanks guys, I will inform my client of the potential risks of losing search rankings and see what they decide to do!

 

How google will detect?

 

Google can penalize you if they can detect you. But its really hard to find the paid links. Another thing is that if paid link is so bad then why google is not penalizing biggest directories that are solely paid like yahoo directory.

 

Good points

 

i think the paid link penalty thing is a myth, probably created by google themselves because they think it's unethical and try to frighten people. but let's face it - they CAN'T really tell if a link has been sold or not (the nofollow thing is rubbish). I wouldn't have a problem with buying/selling links personally.

 

If you get busted, you'll have to face consequences, and these are going to be dire enough (on the top list of link wrongdoings selling links is the most serious one). Sold links can actually be detected (algorithmically and by manual review).

 

I wouldn't sell links on a site that get's good traffic from SE ...