No More Text Link Ads and Paid Links?

The discussion about Google penalizing websites that sell text link ads has been going for a while. It looks like some stronger evidences are emerging, though.

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Search Engine Land just published an article titled “Official: Selling Paid Links Can Injured Your PageRank or Rankings on Google.” The article illustrates some high profile sites like the Stanford Daily, which saw its PR drop from 9 to 7, supposedly due to the the practice of selling text links. Here is a quotation:

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\nLast week, I noticed the Stanford Daily had dropped from when I wrote the above in April to PR7 today. That’s a big drop that has no apparent reason to happen. Some others were also reporting PageRank drops. So I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links.

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In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached, to prevent them from ranking well.

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It looks like there might be a PageRank update going on as well, and several sites that used to sell text link ads experienced a drop in PR (e.g., Entrepreneurs-Journey).

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Personally I will follow Google’s guidelines on paid links. I might not concur with their policy totally, but I really do not feel in the position to risk getting penalized.

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I am also starting to consider if my 125×125 sponsor ads should have the “nofollow” tag or not. But for the moment I will not change it since Search Engine Land itself and several other high profile blogs have the same setup.

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Do you plan to keep selling text links on your website?\n

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