Google penalizes blogs which sell paid links

pagerank10 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.

This post was published by on October 25, 2007

About the Author: Thilak Rao works as a Social Media Expert. He is one of the first professional bloggers from India, and he loves to write, travel and click photos. Follow him on Twitter @thilak

  • http://andymerrett.co.uk Andy Merrett

    Good job we stopped Blue Fish when we did, eh?

    I’m not wholly convinced to stop paid links at present. Though they aren’t my main source of income, they’re not insignificant, and my PR hasn’t been drastically affected (then again, the PR wasn’t so high in the first place)

    I personally think it’s far too early to say exactly how or why Google has acted this way, or even that PR won’t “resettle” over the next few days.

  • http://daily-rambler.blogspot.com/ Brad Dolley

    Yea, Dont feel too bad, I haven’t even had a page rank..

    Google doesnt bother to update the “Smaller” blogs.

    http://daily-rambler.blogspot.com

    That sucks about your page rank though, It must of been hard to get!

  • http://tech-buzz.net Thilak

    Andy: Yeah, but at Blue Fish, we didn’t follow those wicked principles of blankly linking. Or did we?

  • http://andymerrett.co.uk Andy Merrett

    No, we didn’t :) Yet, neither does b5, now, unless Google are going back a long way.

    I would’ve thought relevant outlinks were OK, but it’s appearing not.

  • http://marcvz.net/blog Marc

    Smaller websites have been waiting for a page rank update for months now. Google should either update all page ranks or remove the feature completely.

    The problem is that the internet is too big to manually rank sites so they have to come up with generalised algorithms that look at links and such.

  • http://www.siteguide.us Vijay

    And that’s exactly why only the bigger blogs are being penalized for now. Copyblogger seems to have got its ranking back, but for some others the road seems to go further down!

  • http://www.hoobin.com Ken – Hoobin.com

    Hi, nice blog here. Just my 2cents. Whether you are quality content provider or not, if you sell links, google will go after you since it’s affect their search algorithm.

    Man, we really need to find for a better source of advertisement income.

  • http://www.selbourne.com Selbourne Designing

    not only blogs …but its also websites.
    But one things is that the PR is gonna be only more valuable. So i guess a PR 4 is the new PR6 ? :)
    Maybe

  • http://www.cricketworldcup2011.org/ Linu

    Hi Thilak:
    Did you notice. Page Rank 6 return to you!
    It must be the result removing the paid links. Same thing happened to Problogger.net too
    Linu

  • http://tech-buzz.net Thilak

    Linu: Yeah, I noticed that. Thanks for the update once again

  • http://www.camerasalesonline.com Buying Cameras

    I really don’t know how Google can manage to keep an eye on all these links! They must have a complicated system..

  • http://www.gottapimp.com cool stuff

    I heard about this big shockwave.. and honestly, I think it’s ridiculous. The big G wants control of everything. You guys are right, the only good thing is the PR scale is now different and a pr4 is worth much more.

  • http://www.benjaminpatton.com Big Ben Patton

    Unless your going the route of John Chow I would not recommend messing with google about page rank or selling links, avoid it at all costs period, if your caught and you are not a high word of mouth blog you will have just shot yourself in the foot and cut off your own nose all at the same time.

  • http://www.norhafidz.com Norhafidz

    Uncle G Control the environment, they showed that when they penalized all the websites. What did I do? I still sell links but not in huge quantity :)