Google Lowers PageRank For Link Sellers

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 8 of October , 2007 at 8:32 am

(Source) Last week, I noticed the Stanford Daily had dropped from when I wrote the above in April to PR7 today. That’s a huge drop that has no apparent reason to happen. Some others were also reporting PageRank drops. So I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank 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.

This is rather odd. If Google is no longer relying on PageRank then why would they penalize sites selling links with a drop in PageRank? This policy, pointed out by Danny Sullivan, is a change in policy for Google. In 2005, Matt Cutts went on the record for saying sites that sell links won’t be penalized with a decrease in PageRank, so this is a new development. I think this new policy is evidence that PageRank still is a useful measure of a site’s trustworthiness. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be such a big deal.

Google scientists believe that paid links muddy the waters of trust because people naturally link to sites that they like and find trustworthy. But if someone is linking to a site because they were paid to when they would not have linked to that site otherwise then this screws with Google’s natural linking algorithm. I’d have to agree. But I don’t necessarily agree with lowering a website’s PageRank because they sell links. What if some of those links are good links that are an indicator of trust and the linking site would link even if they weren’t being paid? I think there is a danger of penalizing sites that don’t deserve to be penalized.

This policy, if rolled out entirely (right now, the penalties are carefully selected and don’t affect every site on the Internet) across the Web, would affect smaller businesses the most. What if there is a local business directory that sells links to local businesses? Should that directory be penalized if the selling of those links is its business? I don’t think so.

Google can do whatever it wants with its algorithms, but this is one that I’m not on board with. But I will say you are better off buying links to get the traffic than you are buying links to get the PageRank.

                      Category: SEO