Hi, I notice this site which gets tons of traffic and its a PR8 but after all of its posts they display dofollow links spots they sold to their advertisers. And its not 3,4 links but 40+. Does Google do not penalize sites that are too big? What do you think?
I guess their backlinks and outgoing links ratio is too high to impose any penalty. Can you share the URL?
http://bit.ly/qyjVu Try going to any article. I am not too envy or what so much but I think its not cool that when we smaller sites do something less than this we will face the action in a blink of an eye.
any site selling links with a sole intention of passing PR will be penalized. however, out of hundreds of millions of websites out there, google might not have any clue whether the site is question is indeed selling links or not. some competitor might turn evil and tip off google when they will investigate
When google allowed dofollow for paid links.. oh!! wait, when google allowed paid links at first? Anyway, I am clueless. That site indeed selling links yet they have a PR8.
Google still penalize the sites which sell dofollow links no matter how much authority that site has. But its difficult for google to decide if the outgoing dofollow links are paid or free. You can read more about it and report such sites to Google here- http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736
Google generally is not fair, something you have to get used to in this biz. They do what they can to police the internet according to their own rules and business objectives. Those objectives are biased, and they are bound to make mistakes. There's always a lot of sites getting away with breaking the rules, but the more they do it, the bigger they get, and the longer time goes on Google eventually catches up and kills their business. Happens time and time again, don't get too caught up in who is getting a free ride and who is not.
It's not perfect, Google can't penalize these sites or risk having their engine look stupid. They are, however, trying to make these links count for nothing. Whether or not they are at any given moment is up for debate..
I don't think the system is flawed. It's simply those with most money to spend on SEO/marketing can rank 1. You can have one of the most useful website ever but if you don't market it, you will never get on page 1. Google's algo is simply working to make sure spam sites don't show up on page 1 and sites that are listed as no 1 provide some value to the user. I use Google everyday and i am very satisfied with the results.