Will Google's threats make you stop selling text link ads?

Google market search of the search engine market is I believe almost 50%, they send a lot of traffic to web sites, its more efficient to develop methods that increase your ranking in google the spend the countless hours developing other methods of traffic that may only send you a couple hits a month.

 

For me personally only about a third of my traffic comes from search engines - about 90% of that comes from google (though yahoo does seem to finally have started ranking it for some phrases at least). I do believe that online business is only going to work long-term if you create a website that's 'sticky': interesting enough for people to bookmark and come back to. That's also the best way to get FREE links.

 

i never sold links despite some earlier offers
i never plan to sell links at any time in future no matter the $

but i give free links to pages who offer services or products or informations of excellent value that i used repeatedly myself.
and i got thousands of free such links as well during the course of past 10+ yrs having one single steadily growing domain.

i belief that simple steady creation of true valuable / helpful content is better than buying / selling links on an purely artificial $ - basis.
generic links show true popularity and for sure never will be penalized any time in the future.

 

hans your site appears to be an MFA site so I think you would have bigger problems than selling links. 80% of the intitial screen real-estate consists of ads.

 

Good luck trying to sell links on MFA-sites anyhow.

 

I fully agree. Matt Cutts too. And I never sold links anyway.

 

Google is not bluffing If your revenue depends mainly on traffic, you should not sell links.

But I firmly believe that we are about to enter a "Golden Age for Link Selling"

Seasoned sellers know what evasive actions to take to avoid detection. But with the well known, high traffic authority sites scared off, their business can only increase substantially.

 

Couple days ago I made a statement that the Google's action was just a joke to scare link sellers. But now I believe this is a clear warning from Google: "I have caught you red-handed selling links. Now your PR went to 0, but if you ignore this warning, your website will be removed from our search index."

If you sell links and got PR decreased, stop selling links asap. G caught you. You lost. The next thing G would do to your site might be irreversible.