If you sell links, Google is taking more aggressive steps to penalize your site by making it less important in its search engine results. It also drops the “PageRank” score it shows for your site. Danny Sullivan, of SearchEngineLand, has more background.
The latest news was widely reported yesterday. Notable, however, is the lack of real knowledge or analysis about the affect this is having. It could be huge. Many main-stream media sites are among those penalized, with some losing an entire two points from the ten-point scale. Washington Post and Forbes are among those that fall to a mere five points. That’s awful, because they should premier sites. It suggests they are among the worst offenders of paid or bad link policies, and they could lose massive amounts of traffic as a result. We’re still trying to get to the bottom of the real significance of this.
Here are a few sites affected, and the change PageRank they were given. See fuller list here.
- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ PR7 to PR5
- http://www.forbes.com/ PR7 to PR5
- http://www.suntimes.com/ PR7 to PR5
- http://www.sfgate.com/ PR7 to PR5
- http://www.statcounter.com/ PR10 to PR6
- http://www.masternewmedia.org/ PR7 to PR4
- http://www.autoblog.com/ PR6 to PR4
- http://www.engadget.com/ PR7 to PR5
5 Comments
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Mike said:
It appears that Google considers selling links to be evil and they are imposing their “don’t be evil” on the entire Internet. The problem is that selling links is an important revenue source for many publishers. Is Google telling us that AdSense is the only approved way for these companies to generate revenue? Since Google is buying DoubleClick, I would assume that display advertising is good too. Punishing websites that buy links is bad enough, but punishing those that sell links is bad news. It is wrong for a company like Google to abuse their power like this.
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Stephen Larson said:
Someone that makes such a big deal about saying “don’t be evil” like Google does probably is. PS: The drop in CPM from AdSense from the beta over the first few years was a huge disappointment. YPN is just as bad. I’m ashamed to issue the meager earning, I think about dropping it daily.
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Jim Larrison said:
It shows that Google is pushing around their weight. It is silly and does highlight the way that Google looks at the world, by trying to measure value based on linking score. The problem is there are many other value metrics and they are missing these. They are harder to measure, but how about a measurement of engagement on the site or relationships.
I was interested to hear Stephen say there was such a big drop in AdSense CPM, that isn’t what we are seeing in specific niches.
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Greg said:
Not that I’m above criticizing Google (see my blog), but it’s not selling links that Google is so opposed to as it is selling links for the purpose of artificially influencing pagerank.
Part of what determines the relevance and placement of your page in the search results is how many sites link to it and, to an extent, their page rank. So if you have a page that’s not the best result, but you want to push it up toward the top, you go buy links from high-PR sites.
Google provides a way of marking links so that their indexing bot will ignore them, essentially saying “this is a sold link, don’t use it in calculating the linked site’s page rank”.
Why? Well, a link you’d give for free in the context of a story or commentary is an honest recommendation. A link you won’t give unless you’re paid is a dishonest recommendation. If you don’t mark it as sold, you’re basically lying to Google and messing up their efforts to provide the most relevant reaults to searchers.
So, if Google catches you lying to them, especially when they’ve been up front about the rules, how should they react? The only reason you can make money by lying to them is because of the high page rank they gave you, so they take it away to remove your incentive to lie to them.
Sounds reasonable to me.
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