Google PageRank And Selling Text Links

Welcome to Affordable Internet Marketing Blog.
You may want to Subscribe to my Updates or to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Many pageranks were updated last month. In fact, some pageranks were updated no less than three times.

It seems that these are only Toolbars update, but nevertheless it caused quite some disturbance.

Because many sites were ‘punished’ for selling text links. That means, that the updates must have been done manually.

I’m not the expert on this topic, so I don’t know what’s going on exactly. But seeing authority blogs like Problogger have their pagerank drop from 7 or 6 to 4 seems ridiculous to me. Especially since Darren says he doesn’t sell text links.

Google must have been thinking the same, because Darren’s blog now has a pagerank of 6 again.

Google doesn’t like websites or blogs selling text links without a ‘nofollow’ tag. I’ve never sold any text links ever, but others did and now they’re punished for doing so.

One of them was Courtney Tuttle. Court took action and his pagerank got reinstated. Read here ‘Why Google Refunded My PageRank Slap‘.

I’m not totally convinced that his new pagerank 4 was a direct result of his actions, but it sure won’t hurt to do something similar when your blog was affected by the pagerank update.

Court’s main reason for making these changes is traffic. “Google is a very significant traffic source” he says.
Well, if that’s the case and you want to keep it that way, you have to be obedient to their rules. It’s their system, like it or not.

I do understand Google’s thoughts behind these corrective measures. Selling text links with a ‘nofollow’-tag is passing link juice outside Google’s own algorithms, so their system can’t accurately value the sites that are linked to. It thwarts their attempts to deliver high quality search results.

Although lots of people say they don’t care about pagerank, Google’s manual updates are a severe counter measure to avoid that danger.

So if you want to monetize your site AND keep your pagerank in Google, don’t sell text links with a ‘nofollow’-tag!
The question is, of course, if you will be able to sell text links that do have a ‘nofollow’-tag. Who wants to pay for that and, more important, how much?

If you’re keen on search engine traffic - and who isn’t, it’s free! - one alternative is to pay more attention to other search engines and try to rank high there. You may not get as much traffic, but it IS an alternative. Until they ban selling text links too.

Tags: blogging, Google, links, problogger, traffic