I'm wondering what's googles stance on link sale in 2010? has anything changed? is it still being considered as a rigging of serps? I just don't understand, how direct link sales are different from article marketing or social bookmarking, they act as a serp booster all of them in a same way... why pr sale isn't allowed if it doesn't affect ranking? thx.
Google seems to like your link within content. When you purchase links, two or three words about your site. So, increase of these kind of links can look suspicious to Google and they consider it as you deliberatly inflating the PR.
Selling links is still and will probably always be penalised unless it is no followed. This is clearly explained in webmaster guidelines.
The Google webmaster guidelines mention that paid-for links are not permitted, as Barre Tire rightly pointed out. So expect to face a penalty in case you violate those guidelines. Talking of penalties - there ought to be a way to be able to confirm with a search engine (such as Google) that a penalty has been imposed - the objective of our campaign.
Not sure what kind of link sales you mean but I'd think that google doesn't generally "know" if you pay for links or not. Main problem I can think is if your links are associated with poor context or sites that google has blacklisted cause of "spammy" methods.
I think the policy of Google still stand on link sales, they penalize any website or blog that is doing so...
Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as: * Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag * Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.tx The rules of google wont change.. Keep alert