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Penalty Imposed by Google
on Websites that Sell Text Links |
Google has for a
long while made its views known on paid links. It
has followed through with its threats recently (October
2007) by severely penalizing websites selling text
links. The main argument put forward by Google is
that paid linking impacts its algorithm and,
accordingly, results in lower quality search results.
It seems that Google has no means to counter the selling
of links so it resorted to forcing webmasters to do the
work for them.
Many websites
have seen their Page Rank (PR) decrease substantially.
Some websites have even lost all their PR. This
has lead to many bloggers crying to injustice, but
voicing their discontent is all they can do. Some
webmasters have decided to comply with Google's
guidelines while others still refuse to align. The
reality is that many websites rely heavily on link sales
as their main source of revenue. For them to no
longer sell links would mean to go in the red.
Whether to
continue selling links or not is a decision left to each
webmaster, but the current crackdown by Google will
inevitably lead to a "black market" where webmasters
will try to camouflage their link selling and hopefully
go unnoticed by Google.
It is unclear
why Google is going against websites selling links as
opposed to websites buying links. If Google's goal
is to improve its search results, it would only make
sense to penalize websites that try to improve their
rankings through monetary means since they don't deserve
those rankings in the first place. Websites
selling links on the other hand may be relevant, so
penalizing them for selling links is not the best course
of action. In other words, link selling is not an
indicator of the relevancy of a site, but link buying
does impact the rankings, so why not only crack down on
link buyers? Actually, it seems that Google is not
even going against sites buying links as many of those
sites still have their PR intact. Google probably
views link sellers as the source of the problem.
That's a mistake however. Link buyers are at the
core of the problem and it would be much easier to go
against them.
To tell
websites selling links to stop basically means to tell
them to refuse money coming their way. This goes
against basic business sense. On the other hand,
telling websites that buy links to stop is a much easier
undertaking because they can simply redirect their money
to acceptable SEO practices. They don't have to
"say no to money" the way link sellers would have to.
They just have to redirect their spending to something
more acceptable.
Maybe this
latest move by Google has uncovered one of its
weaknesses. What if its algorithm cannot crack
down on links coming to a site, but can do it for links
leaving a site? Another theory is that sites
buying links might also buy exposure online through
Google Adwords. Google may not want to go against
its own customer base.
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