You know the google rule: "you may buy PR backlinks provided that they are nollow". http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736 So I am wondering why an international institution may sell about 14000 permanent links with very high PR (a PR8 homepage , thousands of PR5 or PR4 internal pages) on a dofollow basis against payment of up to US$1.5m over 2 years. http://whc.unesco.org/en/news/561 http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...o.org&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai= May those 14000 backlinks be dofollow? Why not the same rule for all webmasters?
I mean: why google does not apply the "rules" in a same way to everybody ? If I buy only one dofollow link, my site will be penalized (if the purchase becomes known). Has google a two-tier policy? Some sites may buy huge amounts of high PR links without penalty while all the other ones are penalized if they do so. Here, the case is incredible: thousands of high PR dofollow links for ever, against a one-time fee. Also why does Unesco provide so many high quality links at a rather cheap prices ?
I haven't seen too many established sites be "penalized". Our advertisers buy 9,000,000+ links from us and not a single one has had any issues. In fact, 90% keep renewing. I wouldn't recommend tons of sudden backlinks if your site is new and non-established though.
Because "big is beautiful" and because they are "too big to fail". Google is not very strict when it comes to large authority sites. Small guys on the other hand are hit much harder. And when you receive a penalty most of the times you don't know even why