PageRank update and link sales

The Google Page Rank update is well underway and Google appears to be placing penalties on sites with paid links. I say appears to be as Google do not let you know you are doing something they don’t like. If you Page Rank drops and/or you start seeing less traffic from Google search then you may be doing something that Google doesn’t like.

Google can penalise a site for many reasons so it is not always obvious what you have done wrong. If you link to a site in a bad neighbourhood or sell links without using the nofollow attribute then this may be the cause of the penalty.

What’s wrong with what Google is doing?

The problem is not that google is punishing sites for selling links that are deemed to be being sold to manipulate the search results. The problem is that Google is only punishing some sites which sends out a mixed message. They are also not making it obvious to webmasters what they are doing so webmasters are going to continue to buy/sell text links based on Page Rank.

Should I be selling links?

Yes is the short answer. If your site is dependant on Google traffic then you will have to follow Googles guidelines to stay in there good books, Google says.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

If you decide not to follow the guidelines there is still no saying if your site is going to get penalised. Following the guidelines at least ensures you will stay in their good book.

What to do

The current situation is that there is probably only a minority of webmasters that are following the guidelines. This means that if you sell links that do not pass on PR then you will be at an instant disadvantage against a similar site that passes PR in it’s links.

Eventually everyone is going to have to sing to the same hymn sheet but in the meantime there is going to be confusion and turmoil in the Text link sales market.