I have a website which would make me around $600-$700/month if I sold links on it. However, it is also making me nice income from adsense and since right now I am working a lot on it, it will be making me much more in the future. Should I sell links on it, and risk getting penalized by Google? Do websites get penalized for linking out to sites that are not relevant? Right now I am getting very high rankings for my keywords, but I am afraid that I could jeopardize that by linking out to irrelevant sites. Even though I never experienced this before, is it possible? Any help would be appreciated! Thanks
selling links will not ne a reason for google punishment but if you sell links to sites which are not relevant to your site , it will not effect on serp result
IMO linking to bad sites will harm your site, if you sell links only sell to sites that are related -and ideally add value to your visitors. Google need not know that you are selling links - just don't advertise on your site or with your domain name.
If you think that by selling links on your site you could make a few more bucks then why not. Try to get relative links that are related to your site and will be useful to your sites visitors.
I understand that if I link to relevant sites there will be no penalty. But what if I link to irrelevant sites? Not to sites such as pharmacy, gambling, etc. just to sites that are not relevant to mine, for which Google could think do not add value to my visitors.
Yeah, I know that they will not suspend my adsense account, I was just wondering if it will harm my SERP. So general opinion is that it will. Well, right now I am linking out to a few irrelevant sites, but it did not do any harm to rankings. I guess I will try to stick with relavant links as much as I can, if I ever decide to sell links on it.
Links out can hurt a little that's what made recip links mostly irrelevant. Links out to bad site can definitely hurt you. I had problems with that indirectly.
According to this source: http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html PR "leaks" with any external or even internal link; it doesn't matter if it is related or not. The lower the PR on the receiving end of the link, more the page linking to it would be penalized. The moral of the story -- try to link to high PR sites, do not worry about their subject.
I really cannot agree with this one. It just wouldn't make sense for Google to do something like that Just because website currently has low PR it doesn't mean that it is a bad website and that sites linking to it should be penalized.
good site Velocity, if you get good money from adsense donot sell links just take care your site and increase content to get more adsense revenue.
I essentially paraphrase what the source says, which, in turn, based on the paper written by Google founders. Here are few quotes: Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0, it is usually a penalty, and it would be unwise to link to it... ...Outbound links are a drain on a site's total PageRank. They leak PageRank... Hope it helps.
I essentially paraphrase what the source says, which, in turn, based on the paper written by Google founders. Here are few quotes: Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0, it is usually a penalty, and it would be unwise to link to it... ...Outbound links are a drain on a site's total PageRank. They leak PageRank... Hope it helps.
You could always sell links to buyers who don't mind being nofollowed. Anyway selling one or two links a month shouldn't be a problem, me thinks.
I was under the impression PR0 are new sites or really really bad sites, grey bar is for the penalties. But otherwise, I don't think selling links is a bad thing, yes of course all links will leak PR, that is the whole purpose of it from the purchasers point of view. Just stick as much as possible to relevant links and you will be fine.
I have been selling links on some websites for more than a year, but after the last Google update finisned (Few days before) I lost some PR for all sites those selling links, like form 5 to 3 or form 4 to 2, I am not sure if selling links is the reason or the last update was using different creteria. SERP still ok for them, but it looks a new way that Google is using now fo fight selling links, and if I am right I think it is a good way to prevent the webmaster from selling links without applying any penalty that may affect its SERP