Does Google ban, de-value or penalize sites that sell links

Now I read Matt Cutts blog and I don't think it is that clear on exactly what googles position is. I wonder what the other search engines think about it. What is strange is that there are many ads shown by Google for link sellers and a lot of those sites seem to have good PR and are obviously not banned or getting banned.

thanks
Jay

 

Here is how I interpreted what he said. They do not ban, devalue, or penalize sites that purchase links.... however they are getting better and determining what incoming links to your site you paid for and that those links are no longer counting (or no longer counting as much) towards your "link popularity".

 

Thats a total misconception that pops up again and again and never dies. Selling text-link is selling advertising space. Google wouldn't devalue or penalize as selling advertising is one of the only very 'few' ways to make money on the Internet. I always suggest learning from experience rather then listening to everyone's rants. These are just total rumors, some people would disagree but those are usually the ones that didn't consider other factors of why they got banned and in a general area of selling links and buying links isn't a negative with search engines.

 

That's what I think he meant too.

That being said, I have seen sites get banned for both selling and buying links, though, as the apparent reason, but it seems in those cases it was always a manual review, rather than done by any algorithm.

 

BTW, my comments were related to sites that purchase links, not sites that actually sell the links. I might have misinterpreted the question.

 

INV - I cannot agree with you. I have seen it happen first hand. Why do you think some of these directories are being banned? I don't know about most of them for sure, but there are a couple I have real, direct info about.

 

Google can distinguish between relevant and irrelevant links....that's it.... I dont think it is possible for Google to know if a link was bought or not.

 

If selling links is enough to get you banned then why are these folks using AdWords to sell their links and it seems they still maintain PR.

 

very well put.

 

I think they can get away with that because Google has some separation between the AdSense/AdWords teams and the web search teams.

 

I would challenge whether or not G can distinguish between relevant & irrelevant links. I think there some evidence that it is getting better at this perhaps but it is still not 100% quite yet.

 

Of course, Google will never be able classify all links into "relevant" and "irrelevant" with 100% accuracy.

The point I am making is - it is much easier for the Google algorithm to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant links , than to judge whether a link is a paid one or not.

 

Directories is a danger zone to begin with. Many factors apply when putting this point to directories because many of them might get flagged like some scrapper directories and spam sites do. Sure it isnt a solid statement but its a poke at another side of the story.

Google did have a phase they were going heavy against directories if you dont recall a few months back along with affiliate websites since they dont offer much content. Although they were going against mainly Dmoz I would bet it could of gotten further.

I always had this gut feeling directories arent that stable and are the most risky websites to run because its all outgoing links with minor content and I would guess a huge factor played in the banning or whatever it was. Again this doesnt mean every directory has to be banned now but a directory raises a lot of flags because of many factors and google might of thought that it wasnt meant to be for some reason.

 

If somebody sells 5 links privately on their site then google won't be able to devalue these links as it can't know they are being sold.

If the same webmaster puts a notice on the site saying "Text links for sale on this site" then google probably knows the site is selling links and can devalue them.

As long as the site you are paying to link to you is not doing the same for loads of other sites there will not be any problems I think.

 

Agree with that about directories 100%

 

Back to the 1st part of the post, if big G knows a site is selling links don't they stop the ability to pass pr?
Directories I'm sure they are watching and do not count as much and I think article sites are going to be the next big target since that seems to be a big inbound link trend.
Moderation and a variety of link sources is best, keep the soureces spread out so when they do shift the algo's you won't take such a big hit in the serps. The good thing is we are all doing the same stuff so your competition will probably get knocked down too.

 

Yeah right, google has in the past totally removed sites for selling "pr"

Do a search for "search king"

it is widely believed with good cause that occasional google stomps on people they see buying and sell PR, usually most of the egregious offenders

Google does not care if its selling "advertising", google is not a fair and impartial being, if something interfers with results they will definaly devalue it, its their results they can do whatever they want regardless if its fair.

here is more info on searhking

http://news.com.com/Judge+dismisses+suit+against+Google/2100-1032_3-1011740.html

 

This is another scenario thats not your typical website selling advertising text-links.

The fact that that website is a marketing company advertising they will bring your website up in ranking by selling links puts it in a different direction.

Sure, google has the right to do whatever they wish with their index no question about it.

But we are talking about average situation thats in the scale of the comparison to the argument.

In a general scenario your website wouldnt be penilized for selling test-links.

If you want to compare this against real life situations consider that there are huge news companies online and media sources selling text-links and they no daught google knows about this.

Again there is no solid statements and stuff varies, there is always a risk factor in everything in SEO and not everything is solid.

 

thanks for the information here. i have that same question in mind because I plan to sell some links on my site.

 

if you are privately approached by someone offering to pay you to put a link on your site, and you only do this for a few links that are relevant to your site's content, I don't think you need to worry about google.

as other people have pointed out, directories raise red flags and seem to be a risky idea. I bought a domain about a year ago for the purpose of making a directory. soon enough, i decided that the amount of work required didn't justify the money and the risk of getting slammed by G in the end.