Hey all, Everyone is (or should be) aware that paid links which are detected have the PR/SERP value of them penalized or diminished. However if you're detected as excessively link buying, can your site's overall SERPs or PR be damaged?
If you're detected as buying links you are doomed The trick is to buy such that you don't get detected
The flaw is in the assumption that a decrease in PR means a reduction in SERP position. Those 2 are completely different things. More FUD from Googleplex.
No way, Google cannot penalise you for incoming links if it were so your competitors site would be very easy to wipe out of SERP's for you - by extensively linking to them from spammy sites.
From where you have brought a links. I mean, its relevant or irrelevant. Because there are lots of websites those are specially made for selling links.It could be harmful for both PR and Ranking.
paid links could in fact hurt your own rankings if discovered, i've had it happen to me. also, if one of your competitors figures out that you are buying links they can report you directly to google, and thats not good for anybody!
Google has only manually penalized a few larger sites that were well known to be buying links. You will be fine.
I don't know what you mean by 'larger sites'...hopefully mine doesn't fall into that category. I won't give the exact term, but lets just say its similar to ranking first in google for 'debt consolidation'.
There is no any penalty for buying links, but if you are selling need to be ready for panelization from Google.
If you're buying the links because you want the PageRank and higher search rankings, then the trick would be not to do it in the first place. Anyone who is selling links should be adding rel="nofollow" to them anyway - afterall, the consumer should be buying the traffic, not the rankings, that these links can provide. And if you think that you need higher rankings to get more traffic, just ask quicksilver101 what a simple change to his Web site that I recommended to him did to his traffic and business levels inside a week (or just read his reply in my SEO services thread here on the forums).