It looks as if Google has started penalizing blogs and websites which sell text links. The pagerank of scores of blogs who sell paid links or excessively links to other blogs on the same blog network have been dropped. TechBuzz lost its pagerank from 6 to 4.
Darren from Problogger.net got penalized for not selling links. He took out text links months ago, but yet he was penalized. This could be the result of his participation in b5media, but then again, he linked to other blogs in his network just as a friendly gesture.
Copyblogger, DownloadSquad, CybernetNews have also lost their pagerank due to the same story. I’m wondering whether penalizing poor publishers is a good idea. Ultimately, it’s publishers who write quality content which is later indexed by Google. I think penalizing advertisers would be a better option for Google to stop the whole text link advertising thing.
Even though, I haven’t seen a clear dip in my traffic, I’m not sure how things might go in the near future, so I have decided to stop selling links. All links sold until today will run till they expire.
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