Google is dropping all Keywords to those sites that have sold text links on them

How do you know the links on your site are passing PR?

As for whether they can detect them, I think by now two things are quite clear:

1. Google does not yet detect ALL paid links.

2. Google can and does detect and neutralize many paid links and their algorithms are getting better at detecting them.

Their sponsored links do not pass PageRank. Neither do ads published in the AdWords -> AdSense program.

 

1st of all I never said that my links pass PR; they might or they might not. And they can’t detect paid links (unless I guess if I have BUY LINK HERE) they can only assume they are paid it makes no since if you take a sec to think about it.
Maybe I just like your site and I want to link to it only I would know that. I get so many back links to my sites that I never even knew ware out there; they are from fan sites and so on.
If Google starts dropping those site that would be the dumbest think I have ever hears and they really need a new project to occupy their time with.

 

What you said was

What Google does when they detect paid links is nullify the ability of those links to pass PR. So when you say, "all my sites have sold links on them and never had any problems", my response is how do you know that? If Google has detected those links as paid, and nullified the PR value, and if your intent was to sell links to help the PR of pages they point to, then your sites do have "problems" - you just don't know they do.

If it gives you comfort to believe that, knock yourself out.

If Google starts dropping which sites?

 

Minstrel I don't see an easy way for even a human to know if a link is paid for (unless its blutantly advertised as such) .... what I mean is can you really be sure that a link is paid for ??

 

I don't claim to know how they do it. They have an army of Ph.D.s working on issues like this. But they do it and have demonstrated that.

 

Stop selling links, simple as that. BIG G says Don't do it, don't.

 

You can sell links as advertising - nothing wrong with that. Just don't sell them or advertise the availability of links as having anything to do with PageRank.

And if you BUY links, understand what you're buying: advertising, traffic. If you can't see getting any significant traffic from the site, don't waste your money. Note that this rule of thumb automatically leads you to the issue of relevance. If your site is about programming, don't advertise on a site about knitting.

 

This is exactly the point I am trying to make Minstrel ...

Since they allow links as advertising ... how can they know if one intented their paid link to be for PR or just traffic ? I mean they can't be 100% certain what the purpose of it was ... unless they actually force everyone to include that stupid "nofollow" attribute, and penalize the ones that don't ... and with a very big percentage of the links on the internet right now being paid for, they are going to have a very hard time clearing this up ...

 

The Gov knows they have tons of money, It would not suprise me that they go after them very soon.

 

Google doesn't care what your intention is - all they have to do is nullify any PageRank benefit from the link. The link can stay as an advertising link.

On the other hand, Google does care about advertising the sale of links for their PR benefits. For example, if you are advertising "links from a PR6 page", expect Google to be unhappy about that. Advertise it as "links from a page with X unique visitors per month" and you'll be fine.

 

You got a good point there Minstrel: make anything that looks like advertising loose any PR benefit (passing of PR) and your are done ... simple.

 

That's actually what Google has been doing for some time now. I think a lot of people are confused by the penatlies applied to blatant link-sellers and participants in mutual linking schemes. If you are a buyer or seller of links, you're not generally going to be penalized because there's nothing wrong with buying or selling advertising and Google acknowledges that.

As just one example, TLA got penalized for advertising their links as increasing PageRank. People buying links or publishers displaying those links weren't penalized other than through the nullifcation of the PR value of those links.

 

Yes a lot of dropping from the Google index and even in PR, anyhow if you webmasters still want to sell links just add rel="nofollow" to keep your site clean.

 

The guy said they knocked down all his sites that were selling links, every site he sold a link on was knocked down, and every site he didn't is fine, and has not moved.

They didn't 'think' he was selling links, they knew it, and he confirmed it in the first post.

I second your original advice, if you care about the serps, you have to choose, do you want to sell links or rank well on google. If you care about the SERPS, I would remove the links and file for re-inclusion if the SERPS do not come back.

That is obviously false. Search for a real competitor of adsense on google, such as YPN, guess what -- they rank fine. Selling clicks, is not selling links, which is what adsense does, they give you clicks.

It basically comes down to this. It is google's search engine, they have the executive decision, on what happens to make it a better search engine.

They gave the word weeks upon weeks ago, plenty of time to stop selling and buying links. Why are you guy's shocked now that your serps are dropping? They told you to stop doing it. That is like the electric company giving you notice the price is going up, but you being shocked when the bill comes.

 

That's what kills me about the current debates at DP and elsewhere. Many have admitted to breaching Google's guidelines but (1) they seem surprised and (2) the keep shouting "where's the proof?", as if having numerous directories wiped out of Google's rankings almost overnight wasn't evidence enough.

Exactly. Except it was much longer than weeks.

 

Yeah I agree though I was not complaining really I was saying they got me.

Traffic has been be back since I removed some lettering but I still have the sold links up.

I am guessing that is what did it. Otherwise it is hard to prove since most of the links are to similar sites.

 

Everyone knows about 'the guy', 'the guy' is an myth....when stuff like this happens fact and fiction get mixed together and the myth often takes on a life of their own. Each side for and against pump up their side with stories of 'the guy' and the truth becomes a murky pool somewhere in the middle.

I had a directory that was not ranking for it's name for around 4 months but I was still able to move up the SERP's for a very competitive keyword from position 79 to 39. Plus there are all kinds of proof about sites that openly sell links that have not been touched.

One directory I have used as proof in many examples has moved off the front page to the third page with it's 40 (many unrelated) site-wide links and it's offer to get "your link here" - I seriously doubt that it is penalized.

It all seems too random to be any type of specific penalty, I think the most likely answer is that Google is playing around with it's algo. I have no doubt that Google would like to de-value or punish folks that sell links to game the search engines but unless they demand 'no follow' there is not real way for them to tell one-way-or-another. It is possible they have come up with some internal burden of proof but I doubt they would ever use that amount of manpower to punish a few dozen (or few hundred) sites.

 

the same happened to me but came back after 2 weeks

 

That's a little presumptuous. If one of your friends had his site penalized, would you run to an open forum to tell the world about it?

Are you suggesting that wasn't a penalty?

Have you ever seen a claim by Google or anyone else that they currently can detect ALL paid links? Of course not. If they could, Cutts wouldn't be talking about improving their paid links detection and soliciting help from webmasters.

But what does that prove? Only that you may be able to get away with link buying and selling for a while. It doesn't prove that Google can't already detect many paid links automatically and many others manually, and it certainly doesn't prove immunity to penalties. If you know about those sites, so do others and sooner or later one of those will report them.

I might also add that, like your claim, most of the claims of "many sites openly selling links" fail to identify the sites. Consequently, we are expected to take the word of the person making the statement.

Again, since you don't identify the directory, how are we to examine whether or not it has been penalized, or anything else about the site?

You and others keep making this statement. The problem with the claim is that Google has demonstrated in several ways that they can and do detect paid links, with or without no-follow. That would seem to make your statement and others like it rather pointless.

You still seem to be missing the point. There are two actions that Google can and does take. The first is a manual penalty, which is probably what dinged all those directories recently. They use manual penalties only sparingly, generally either (1) as a stop-gap measure while they update their algorithms to do the job automatically; or (2) to make a public and dramatic statement that what certain people are doing is unacceptable to Google and will not be tolerated. I suspect that both of these figured into the directory penalties.

I don't see anything at all random about what Google has done. Examine the sites that were hit and you'll see that they were some of the most blatant in their violations of Google's guidelines. Many directories that were not in violation of the guidelines weren't touched. What's random about that?

 

Just like everyone else I can't 'know' I can only make an educated guess. But it seems a bit strange that you would penalize a site for it's name but still allow it to climb in the SERPs for a very competitive keyword. It leads me to assume it might just be some sort of algo glitch.

And I feel it is you missing the point. You talk about these penalties like they are 'fact' but really it is just one interpetation. My feeling and 'point' is that if google was trying to send out a message and wanted to punish certain high profile directories then why not de-index them or make public some sort of penalty. Some of the directories effected did have things in common but there seemed to be dozens of similar directories that were not effected. So basically you are looking at the few that had something in common and saying that proves a penalty and I am looking at many that were not effected and questioning whether there was a 'real' penalty involved.

I have named a directory as an example earlier on in this thread but I don't want to come across as a snitch. But do a search for 'web directory' and even the site that holds the number 2 spot has 25 home page links (15 are site-wide), some for loans and other irrelevant text links. If google was really going to penalize some sites you figure they would start with the highest ranking ones?

I guess without some sort of statement from google all we can do it make assumptions but I really feel there is not enough evidence to state the google has specifically penalized any industry. I have seen posts about affiliate sites, blogs and regular websites all complaining of the same problems with massive SERP drops and for not ranking for their names.

I think we just have to agree to disagree until there are more facts available.