Is there an internal Google database of sites evaluated, discussed and voted on for banning? Are their new policies that ban blogs or Websites that they are suspecting of selling too many links? Or existing for the purpose of selling links? Do Google Engineers read and evaluate link sales on forums - as was rumoured last year? Intesting conclusions drawn from referrer logs. http://blogoscoped.com/forum/110901.html
I think you'll find almost everything is automated... way too much work for people to do... If there are databases, we'll never get to see them...
Selling and buying link Could never be cause of Banning website,, because this process is totally marketing related and these process nothing to do have any thing related to server... Unless you by pass google guideline through your server....
You will never get banned for selling links. It's YOUR site after all, you can do anything you want with it.
You won't get banned for selling links. Even selling 1 million links from one page won't get you banned. However I do believe that the value of those links will decrease, or your PR will be affected. In my newbish thoughts, the whole idea of awarding 'scores' for links was as a method of voting on a website - the more links a website had, the probability was that it was respected and widely referenced. Selling links undermines this voting process and skews it towards anyone with enough money .... more importantly for google it compromises the search results it offers. Thats why they are clamping down on paid links. They won't ban you, but the 'scoring' of those links will be decreased IMO.
this what Matt said. Google is their search engine they will do whatever they want to make their search results relevant
And the same thing applies to google, they can do what ever they want on their "site", including banning sites from their index.
firmaterra is right, selling links won't get you banned. Only your site will get penalized and disappear from the SERPs. Google will also discount all those links so your customers get no value from them ... I don't believe Google will automate the process, they'll just make examples of some to discourage others from buying and selling links. Lots of people work at Google and they do surf. Why, Matt Cutts even has a registration here at DP ...
If Google is banning sites with too many paid links on them then they may as well ban every single site using Adsense as they are paid links too.. Google are selling links on your site on your behalf!!!
to my mind, they will never bann a website for selling links, ,but they will decrease their pagerank or decrease their trustrank...
True, but their own adsense is not taken into account when calculating PR. In other words, you buy loads of ads on google, but none of them will affect your SERP. Not even if you took out hundreds of millions of ads on one page. Its the same with advertising. If you use the attribute "no follow" in all your links, you'll find Google will ignore the link (as its a paid advertisement) - hence no effect on SERPS. So google is happy and won't penalise the webpage. However if you put 10's on links on one page, with no "no follow" attribute, Google COULD presume its an advertisement. I say could, because I don't know for definite what way Google will class it, but to my thinking thats what their trying to achieve ~~ Distuingishing the actual votes for a page, from simple advertisements for a page.
You domain may suffer a penalty (drop in SERPs and no or low PR) if you sell links, etc, but I doubt you would be banned. I also agree, it's probably automated in terms of the reports, but they would likely then have a team that critiques the reports and then decides on what and how to punish. Perhaps eventually it will all be automated or almost automated, once their algorithm closely matches the results and recommendations of the human evaluators.
My domain has had a penalty. Because when I search it its somewhere in the 5th page (from the 6 pages) using the uniquely name of the domain as search keyword. The other results are of websites talking about my site or mentioning my name. I have never sold a link and as far as I know have never done anything against the TOS in terms of search engines. How can a penalty be corrected? p.s sorry if this is a bit offtopic
My site had its PageRank decrease, even though backlinks have increased significantly since the last re-index. I have over 13k pages indexed through Google, and my PR is now 3? I am currently writing an article and interviewing a lot of the top people in the business about it. I posted the questions I am asking them here... http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=509577 Feel free to chirp in! Thanks!
Post your sites link in the review section and ask for a SEO review, though you may not get a complete picture out of it, but you might find valuable clues on why the penalty might have been imposed on your site.