Susan Suarez

Just about every SEO site is talking about Google’s decision on paid links, the reason for the late page rank update and Google’s firm hand in dealing with sites that sell paid links.

I’m reading it everywhere. Many people are wondering if they are losing traffic, page rank or search ranking because Google has discovered that they were selling paid links.

How will sites be penalized? The word is that Google could prevent links from a site or pages in a site from passing Page Rank and drop or remove a PageRank score from ones that already have it. Some webmasters have reported drops of 1-2 scores. To confirm suspicions, Search Engine Land

confirmed with Google that Page Rank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links. 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.

I’ve read numerous posts on this and Search Engine Land summed the positions of all arguments perfectly:

• It’s Google’s search engine. They have every right to say that if you sell links, they might penalize you.
• Google is not telling people what to do with their sites, which is a popular argument point. Google is telling people what to do if they are concerned about doing better in Google. Don’t want to be harmed in Google? Don’t sell links.
• Don’t care about Google? Sell links all you want.
• Despite Google’s policy and even this latest action, they’ll never catch all the paid links. It’s part of the reason I’d like to see them back off the paid links war and instead work out other ways to determine if a link deserves credit, paid or not.
• I don’t want people who innocently sell links to be harmed.

Ugh…Who knows how far back Google has or will be reviewing their database to apply penalties to websites.

I’ve compiled some great articles/posts on SEO/webmaster experts take on Google’s move. It’s very interesting to read the comments.  Please take time to read some of these articles to decide what you want to do with your website. Right now it’s extremely important to think about your TextLinkAds relationship (if you have one), no follow attributes and protecting yourself by creating a robot file (exclude folders from search engine robots/spiders).

Articles:

• Search Engine Land
• Daily Moolah
• Yaro Starak
• David Airey
• Jennifer Laycock
• Garry Conn
• Not So Boring Life (Instructions refer to creating a robot file to get out of supplemental index, but the same method could be used to hide folders you don’t want Search Engines, like Google to see…)
• Matt Cutts

I don’t know how far Google is going to dig up dirt on selling paid links…it’s going to be interesting and a bit scary.