I consider buying a favicon spot on an authority website of my niche. Check a screenshot here. I already noticed that the PR of this website dropped from PR7 (or PR6, I'm not sure) to just PR4. I think it's Google's penalty for selling links (the link are do-follow). I wonder if my site can also be penalized for buying that link? Or will my site get penalized only if I start selling links on it?
Good question, I believe in the eyes of Google anything purchased that can alter SERPs or Pagerank is against their TOS, if it will use the rel="nofollow" element in the hyperlink then it's within their TOS.
I diagree. You will get benefits from the link. cssremix.com , because from what I gather from the image that's the website we are talking about has a pretty good traffic stats of about 30k uniques / month. You'll get a lot of visitors from that link. I believe this is the main purpose of advertising, not artificially increasing you PR and SERP. Edit : Got the stats for cssremix.com from here : http://www.statsaholic.com/cssremix.com
The main reason why I wanted to purchase a spot is to get a high PR backlink (and even a related one) for my site. And this backlink should hopefully get my site at least a little higher in search engines.
Buying Pagerank is a gamble, Google is cracking down on text link sellers, you'll lose your investment once they penalize the site your purchasing the PR from since you'll no longer get pagerank juice from them. Worry about SERPs not pagerank.
If you are buying for that I think it's safe to buy. The didn't add yet rel="nofollow" and I don't think they are interested in doing that, since their PR dropped and they did no change. Here's a link to the google policy regarding this : http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736
Yeah, I'm not looking to increase my PR, but the SERPs. OK, so I will rather not buy it. Thanks for your answers.
the thin pixel ad bar seen in the screenshot of the original post - I'm guessing it might be custom programmed.
Guys, my rivals buy a three PR7 links in a short amount of time and feeling pretty good in the SERP. Two of them i've found in text-link-ads. And you still confident that buying links can lead your sites to penality? I don't think so.
You got it wrong. Selling links can lead to penalty, but only if someone reports you via Google Webmasters. Buying is ok.
If you don't add rel=nofollow, you could gain loads from googlejuice. You just run the risk of Google manually catching up with you and punishing you. No googlejuice with that rel nofollow, though...