You sell links, you lose PageRank

Posted on October 20, 2007 by Marek

Last week’s update caused that many well-known blog that lost its current PageRank. Officially confirmed the that it was the penalty for selling links.

Matt Cuss from Google confirmed that it was the action targeted at sites that sell links.

In this situation, many people are asking about the ethics of Google. 90% of Google revenue is selling links. Google is also the world’s most popular search engine, which for many sites is the primary source of traffic. Simply associate these facts to understand how much Google can. But whether should?

A few months ago, when I still worked at the VBC, talked with colleagues about the dominance of Google on the Internet. I have presented my rather pessimistic vision of what can happen to distinguished colleagues who do not agree. My argument assumed that one of the main developers, or one of the men heads of changing the algorithm so that the last websites become the first and the first last. What’s happening? We may assume that at least created much confusion. The largest will certainly will survive, but smaller which all (or most) traffic gain with Google definitely have a problem.

OK, it’s not so probable. Strongly to a purely theoretical considerations. And above all, I do not assume bad faith on policy makers from Google.

But how to call to punish sites that sell links and do not use this AdSense but Text Link Ads?

Should we call it at least unethical? Although we call it does not look good. From a company that has such a huge impact on the entire Internet I would expect actions that do not provide such a large field of imagination to the show. Especially since Google has already agreed with the Chinese government and censored search results (eg for the word Tiananmen) and this does not provide the glory to the Mountain View company.

Quite incidentally, it turned out that PageRank is not too great influence on the position in the search engine. As the author of Mashable.com stated, PageRank may have an impact on advertisers who are willing to buy links on a site with higher rates, but already the position in natural search results there is little impact or none.

Very interested in what Google will do.