You know what, I think maybe we've all become a little bit too dependent on Google as if they are some god or whatever. Now they change page ranks and we're all like "oooh text links are worthless, earth is coming to an end, repent TLA sellers/buyers, repent!" But once we get out of that bubble I think we may realize the following: - Google is not God. - Google is not the only search engine. These days I get more traffic from Windows Live!! - Google PageRank is not necessarily an indicator of overall link popularity, which has an effect on SERPS in other search engines aside from Google, albeit including Google. - Just because a site today changed its PR number from a higher number to the lesser number in reality does not necessarily mean the site is less valuable and is less popular in terms of links, traffic and even SERPS!! That said, is link selling worthless? I very much doubt so. So google, among everyone, might not like it very much, but as has been pointed out so far it can't perfectly distinguish between payed and non-payed anyway meaning we simply can't draw a final conclusion as to what exactly is going to be a google-related effect of sites buying/selling links. Smarter thing to do would be to evaluate things on a case-by-case basis. Also, a link, payed or not, from a site with that much traffic (not just from google, but from other search engines, social networks, news sites etc.), good search engine saturation and decent SERPS is still going to be valuable to link buyer. Bots are still going to follow these links no matter what one of them (aka googlebot) "thinks" of a link he's following.. Bottom line, let's not blow things out of proportion here and jump to conclusions. In fact, no *general* sweeping conclusions are necessary. Evaluate your business based on your own case! Cheers
I was thinking McDonalds, BurgerKing GM Ford JCPenny Sears MCDonnel Douglas Starbucks Nike and 100,000s of other businesses, never worried about a link to build their business. Just say no to link worry!!!
I agree with the article. But long as there are people who want a shortcut to get higher pr, they will buy links from websites with higer pr, and if done properly and not too many links are sold, it will be very hard for google to detect it.
I think we should move to build a three way link....from what im seen on one of the network that im join(3waylink by jonathan legger) many site on that network has been rank up higher and increase the PR too. From what im monitor in 3waylink forum no one has been report their PR has been drop in past 1 or 2 days after Google PR update. 3way link is link building that connected from A-B-C-A. This link building look nature and not look like as link sale or something like that.
Perhaps websites selling links will include them in content related pages or, as somebody suggested in a post of this tread, websites will build separate pages for each category of links the webmaster plans to sell; he waits for these pages to get PR and then begins the link selling process. But, anyway, the buying-selling process will be no longer straightforwardly as is was until now.
The best way to find links that are 'paid' for is when you find the link GONE after a month or two. (that is when the contract expires) between the buyer and the seller. This is EXACTLY where the Google 'cache' comes in. Hell, I'd link up every insurance site I know of
First off, just wanted to make clear that I am not angry with you, I agree with most what you wrote. It is the Google that starting to irritate me a bit .I understand they are trying to clean up the serps, at the same time they want to keep all the advert $ to themselves Anyway here is my 2 cents: Most of your examples could easily go under link exchange as well. Do you really believe that to avoid possible penalty people should hide those or stop exchanges all together? As far as I remember link sale was not prohibited (by G) if it is intended to gain traffic. Yet still I am not convinced on to why so called “not related†outgoing links or those without nofollow attribute should be considered bad for anyone? Who is to decide if particular link won’t be useful to some of my readers anyway? I mean, soon, there will be a blacklist of words such as paid link or sponsored or whataever G will come up with that are against “the rulesâ€. I think it is time for G to shut up and live the content of my website alone. Nobody will dictate to who do I link to, or on what part of my website links are located period.
You really should not believe everything you read. Not all things are the same for all sites. Think those who sells links as a business, are out of business?????? They're not, and look most still have good PR Two examples. http://www.livecustomer.com/ PR6 Sells via Adwords http://www.linkworth.com/ PR5 Sells via Organic No more needs be said.....
Puh, heavy discussions and many different thoughts. What earticles said makes sense but i think we have to wait a while to judge the whole.. thing. I have a site where i started selling and buying text links about 6-7 months ago. Even via TLA, buying selling i raised from PR3 to PR4. It just dont makes sense for me. I wont worry about Google and its new or not new algorythm. As someone said, Google is big, but it doesnt own the internet.. yet, lol. I also dont care if my PR drops because i bought links, BUT if Serps would drop due to this then its a different story. I didnt follow my sites PR's until i registered here, but (and i can only speak about my sites) traffic didnt influence my PR at all. I have a site that raised from PR3 to PR4 (as mentioned above) that gets about 30 visitors/day. another site receives about 2000 uniques/day and remained PR4 for 3 years now.
They are probably affected by a consistent PR dropping. See what happened with statcounter.com, for example... If a similar think would happen to you, are you sure you won't be affected?
My incomes up over last month which is just a repeat of the months prior and going back in time. PageRank meanwhile is not a concern honestly. My PR 0 site http://www.buyflips.net/ made $5.09 yesterday. My banker still does not have a Google Green Ingot Indicator on the bank walls...
I want to quote a friend who once said: Money can buy "quantity" but not quality. Seems what happened during this last PR update really followed this concept.
I was thinking. What if a bunch of us put a sitewide link at the footer of our own websites, and made it appear like it was a Google paid text link? Something like... Your Text Link Here | Google | Another Site | Another Site Would their algo downgrade them?
Ahm guys.. Google's text link ads aren't being followed by bots. They're cocooned in javascript. They're also not there to give advertisers more pagerank, but rather more clicks and attention.