Google gets over the paid link thing
Quite some time ago, Google went on a rampage and announced it was evil to sell paid links if they passed on pagerank. They zeroed out several of my websites that sold links while missing the others. I wrote a lot about how this all sucked. Eventually, I removed paid links from two of the zeroed sites and asked Google to reinclude them – which they did, within days. But I left one site alone, to see what happened. And now I can tell you the whole story:
- People kept right on buying links, even though I had no PR to pass them.
- In the most recent PR update, Google finally gave up and restored a PR of 1, despite the paid links.
I’m guessing Google figured that if a year of PR0 hadn’t stopped people buying links from my site, PR might not be what they were after with those links? Or maybe it really was just all about making sure Text Link Ads didn’t run AdSense out of town, and now that AdSense’s future is assured they don’t care?
Related posts:- Decision about text link ads
- Venting about Google, paid links, and my future direction
- Don’t let Google push you around, link buyers and sellers
- Google and Paid Links
- Google reader shows up as Google search in AwStats
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1 Comment »
December 6th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
I had a scare with paid links on one of my sites a while back and took them off completely. I never had an issue with Google. But someone announced that one of my blogs was selling paid links, although they linked to a page that had none on them. That scared me enough to stop.
Why can’t Google get over the fact that they created this link economy with their algorithm? The scarcity of diamonds make them valuable, but no one stops us from selling them. But Google has decided to block free internet trade.