The Marketing Punk Blog

No Google isn’t sending out Googlers to go all America’s Funniest Home Videos on paid link sellers, but they are doing the next best thing – removing PageRank from sites who sell links. From what I’ve read Google started doing this over a week ago, but a new round of sites that are known for selling link (and some that aren’t) are getting a symbolic kick to the groin from the Google spam team.

Why is lowering PageRank an effective way to deter link sellers? Mainly because people who buy links pay more for links from sites with high PageRank…so when the PageRank drops, the value of the links on the site go down. Also, sites that are getting hit with PageRank decreases are likely to have already been tagged by Google to not pass any link juice…so in effect, Google is killing these sites’ ability to sell links meant to improve search rankings. (Of course, if you are buying links just to get traffic from a site, spend away.)

Of course, a move like this will only hasten the move of the linking market to the underground…where a lot of link buying activity has headed. (Or at least that’s what I’m hearing.)

The amazing Barry Schwartz provides us with a list of some of the larger penalized sites and also links to a plethora of reports from other bloggers on the switch. See Barry’s post here.

(via InsureMe Affiliate Blog)