Warning About Selling Links

by 12 replies
14
A friend of mine had a great web site with a great PR. Then he sold links to
people to put in the site and his PR fell through the floor.

Google, for whatever reason, frowns greatly on this.

I don't know if this is old news of not because this is something I just
recently found out so please accept my apologies if you already know this.

For those who don't, please be careful about selling links on your web site.
#search engine optimization #links #selling #warning
  • Yep it's pretty old news Steven - but another warning surely can't hurt!
    • [1] reply
    • In Google's eyes, the only thing worse than buying links is selling them. They will hit you hard once they find out. In fact, they have set up a very easy way for anyone to report a site suspected of buying/selling dofollow links - and it's completely anonymous.
      • [1] reply
  • There's another problem with paying for links.. if you stop a months payment and the links are removed that's gonna hit you pretty hard in terms of rank, but then if you start paying for them again Google is gonna spot it straight away and well.. you know the rest.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • I don't know whether your friend got bad PR because of selling links or due to 'bad neighbours'. It is rather difficult to judge the paid links but it is far easier to judge a bad neighbour by G.
  • What's a bad neighbor?
  • This particularly applies if people are using code from a link broker. Usually the PR tanks to 0 but a site can still rank well with absolutely no PR so it's a case of whether you mind losing the ability to pass link juice if going down this route. I'd say it has more viability if you have a high PR site that isn't doing so well on the traffic front. It's been common knowledge for a good while that Google hits sites selling links if it finds out about it.

    Dean
  • Banned
    Here's another little tidbit.....correlation does not equal causation.

    His PR could have dropped for any number of reasons, the least of which is his selling links, unless he was blabbing all over the internet that he had links for sale.
  • What is the difference between selling links and selling advertising on your website? Does Google view both of them negatively? Thanks for any info given.
    • [1] reply
    • Its only wrong if its NOT Google Adsense Links ... because only they can tell us all how to place PROPER relevant links on OUR OWN web properties. Think about that for a second.

      One day we'll figure out how to take the freakin internet back from the mofo's behind the google algo's. Who decided they should be the Masters of the Internet for all to bow before?

      And everyones panties are in a twist over microsofts draconian biz practices.

      • [1] reply
  • Google usually devalues outbound links that has words like 'our sponsored' or 'resources' or 'partners' etc. The best thing to do is to set up links that are positioned like this.

    Also, if you have words such as 'buy links now' or 'text links for sale', on your site you're asking for trouble.
    Also, it's best not to link out to other sites too much from your homepage. This restricts your pr passing through to your inner pages. It's best to link out via 2nd tier pages, and also from within content. Wikipedia style.
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