Some time ago, i wrote an article on Statcounter selling links for pagerank and keyword weight. You see, Statcounter has PR10... Imagine the cash they get for a sitewide link in the left sidebar. I posted the link to my article in Cutts's blog too. He didn't react. Moreover a lot of other members jumped on my neck. Matt Cutts's statement : My statement : Comments on this issue please.
Why do you care so much? Anyway, I don't think statcounter deservers to be penalized for their clear use of space for advertising purposes. The note said it CAN be done, not that it will be done in all cases...
Do you read the news buddy ? People are talking of websites penalised for link selling. Of course I care if some websites are penalised, and some are overlooked. Wouldn't you ? If your website were to be penalised, would you care then ?
Statcounter may very well be penalized now. By what Cutts is saying, penalized sites will still keep their PR on the toolbar and rankings... but the site buying the link would get no benefit from it (and won't know it either).
Well I can't verify that... But if that's the case, I'm happy that the rule is applied to everyone, no matter the website, the PR, the niche or the owner.
how could you know a site bought link from the other? 1) if the buyer site and seller site are not on same topic? 2) position of link? (footer or side panel instead of inside the content)?
Dude .. did you even look at Statcounter ? Left side link module. There are 2 SEO companies there. Those are sold links. PR10 links. Well it doesn't matter.
Expertu I have to agree with Grokodile. Why do you care so much? If you don't wanna get penalized for buying links, erm... then don't buy links. Here's a novel approach, save the money and spend it on advertizing at a high-traffic (and if you're lucky a niche) directory or portal. Quality traffic, it's that simple.
Why do you guys rat each other so much? I don't get it, even if you succeed in getting them penalized how do you profit from it?
If you take that sort of logic further and further back, we should put nofollow on ALL links, since linking to anyone passes on a "benefit" to people, and we know how bad it is to -purposely- manipulate the engines... Fair game to statcounter if they're selling links on a PR10 site, there're a MASSIVE number of sites out there who provide an excellent service to their visitors who're funded totally on selling links. Without selling those links, they lose their primary source of funding and ultimately the internet loses the value of that site. I know that a great deal of us here who specialize in these things would LOVE to have a PR10 site in our control, I'm willing to bet a fair amount of cash that we would also monetize the site via the selling of links. Are you saying the entire link selling/purchasing industry should shut down? Perhaps we should PR0/deindex every link merchant? That would put a great number of families out of business... I'm not trying to start any sort of petty argument, but for the sake of things, please look at it from both sides. The more we remove/penalize monetization methods, the fewer quality sites there will be. (Although some may argue it removes all the MFA sites too )