Do You Care If Paid Links Hurt Your Page Rank?

Posted by Jeff Turner
October 26, 2007

Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google : : "Google's generally never penalized sites for link selling. If spotted, in most cases all Google would do is prevent links from a site or pages in a site from passing PageRank. Now that's changing. If you sell links, Google might indeed penalize your site plus drop the PageRank score that shows for it."

Of course,as the post indicates, this only matters if Google page rank is important to you. Nothing prevents anyone from continuing to do it or profiting from it. Google is just not going to reward the behavior any loing and may even penalize it. My question is this… does it matter? 

Asides

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Comments

Jeff - What do you think of this? I obviously am not using adsense or selling links on my sites so how does my pagerank really affect me? My baby blog (4 months old) just received a 2 from a zero and my website went from 2 to 3. But aside from “WOOHOO lookie here” how does this (pagerank) really impact my sites?

Comment by Ashley Drake Gephart on October 28, 2007 @ 11:15 pm

Ashley… that’s a real good question. I think Joel Burslem has a great discussion of this over at FOREM. It is not specifically related to paid links, but is related to Page Rank. In the end, good content and consistent readership is the key to success. I’ve NEVER paid attention to page rank, ever. I could not tell you what my page rank is on any site I own.

Comment by Jeff Turner on October 29, 2007 @ 8:39 am

Jeff - I forget about it until I start reading all the brouhaha about Google updating pagerank and then I start thinking about it again. I read some of what Joel had and at this point I am going to forget about it again. Until the next update…

Comment by Ashley Drake Gephart on October 29, 2007 @ 2:51 pm
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