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PageRank Dropped Sites For Selling Paid Links

Google finally took their action against the websites who were selling text link ads (TLA). A recent Google pagerank update confirms this penalty officially. Here are the websites who sold paid text link ads and lost their Google pagerank or PR.

Search Engine Optimizers always had a mix reaction about Google’s threat against paid text link ads. Danny Sullivan, from Search Engine Land wrote an article yesterday by mentioning his views regarding this Google’s policy of reducing pagerank and ranking in SERP if a website sells text link ads but do not follow Google’s guidelines.

http://daily.stanford.edu/ [previous Google PR 9]>[current Google PR 7]
http://www.phpnuke.org/ [previous Google PR 8]>[current Google PR 7]
http://www.johnchow.com/ [previous Google PR 6]>[current Google PR 5]
http://paulamooney.blogspot.com/ [previos Google PR 5]>[current Google PR 4]
SEOMoz gathered a big list of directory websites who were affected in this Google pagerank update.
http://www.davidairey.com [previos Google PR ?]>[current Google PR 4] The site lost it’s ranking in search engine result page due to paid text link ads.

There can be many more examples. But i think i made my point.

Paid text links (TLA) are evil
If you have a website and you do search engine optimization, please care about Google’s policy.

These are the recommendations any SEO would give you after the current Google’s pagerank deduction.

Don’t participate in any form of black hat SEO
Add the rel=”nofollow” tag to any paid links on your website
Use robots.txt file to tell Google BOT not to follow your paid text link ad page or directory
Be careful not to link to bad neighborhoods

By the way, i just started this blog on June 6th 2007. If you do not see any pagerank (up to today October 8th 2007) on my blog, thats not because i got penalized by Google, it’s because i haven’t got a pagerank yet. None of my websites lost it PR or lost it’s ranking in search engine result page (SERP). What about you? Did you loose your ranking in this pagerank update?

Oct 9th, 2007 | 1504 Views | Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments | Print

2 Responses to “PageRank Dropped Sites For Selling Paid Links”

on 09 Oct 2007 at 7:20 pm1Make Money At Home On The Internet

I thought Google’s search engine algorithm was automated, this look more objective than subjective. Google are always at work, trying to weed out cheaters.
on 17 Oct 2007 at 4:56 pm2BlogsNBucks

Google does use automated system to calculate pagerank. But to initiate protection against text link ads spam, Google manually deducting pagerank for now. Thats why not all the websites are affected by this. Soon, Google will modify their algorithm so that the pagerank penalty will be automated.

On the other hand Google cannot let this text link ads get away by manipulate their system(boosting pagerank), so Google has to do something today or tomorrow. PageRank and Adsense combined the heart of Google.