[AffiliateHound]

Interesting. Some biggie sites have been hurt:

Another under-the-radar-of-the-real-world blog firestorm erupted yesterday over high profile page rank drops. Google dropped visible PR of many blogs and mainstream news sites presumably as a penalty for selling links.

Google Slams Paid Links? Good or Bad?

[Donuts]

i've been reading about it though, that those site's rankings for their target keywords, and their general traffic volumes, are unaffected... maybe G, knowing that PR is a key piece of the pricing model for people who do sell links, has decided to discount published PR for anyone they think sells links...

it's interesting to watch the evolution of this tit-for-tat battle between people who want to game / leverage the system and the system's owners trying to not be gamed...

[Haiko de Poel, Jr.]

I think G's keepin it real.

[lostdeviant]

I don't think it is going to make a big difference in the end. People are still buying ads and blog posts since it does work even if PR is affected. How many customers say they won't buy a product because a website has a low Page Rank?

[AffiliateHound]

Originally Posted by lostdeviant

I don't think it is going to make a big difference in the end. People are still buying ads and blog posts since it does work even if PR is affected. How many customers say they won't buy a product because a website has a low Page Rank?

That's not the question. The question is: Do customers not find a website because it has a low page rank?

[lostdeviant]

Originally Posted by AffiliateHound

That's not the question. The question is: Do customers not find a website because it has a low page rank?

All of my sites have a page rank of zero or one and I have made enough sales to earn a commission check.

[ProWebAddict]

Google is now GoogleMonster.

Paid links are bad...unless you are buying adwords.

[AffiliateHound]

Originally Posted by lostdeviant

All of my sites have a page rank of zero or one and I have made enough sales to earn a commission check.

That doesn't mean you would not be doing even better with a higher pr.

And, I only posed the question, I did not answer it. Many say pr does not matter anymore, others say it still does.

[loxly]

PR brings the spider, but not necessarily traffic. I had a PR 9 site for a few months and traffic was no more than 100 uniques a day.

[Trust]

A PR 9? You sure? That's almost impossible to get, those are some of the biggest sites on the internet. Amazon is now a PR9, MSN a PR8.

As far as paid links, buying and selling them for PR/SE benefit, I mean they tell you right on the blog:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/

The sites where they advertise they sell links like Text Link Ads, I've seem some sites with that. Always thought that was pretty stupid. Not even making Google work to find you, just waving the flag at them. If they're going to go after it, I would start with the most obvious.

Then there are times you might see a link on a site and who knows if it was paid for or not. There's just really no way to tell.

[lostdeviant]

Originally Posted by Trust

A PR 9? You sure? That's almost impossible to get, those are some of the biggest sites on the internet. Amazon is now a PR9, MSN a PR8.

As far as paid links, buying and selling them for PR/SE benefit, I mean they tell you right on the blog:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/

The sites where they advertise they sell links like Text Link Ads, I've seem some sites with that. Always thought that was pretty stupid. Not even making Google work to find you, just waving the flag at them. If they're going to go after it, I would start with the most obvious.

Then there are times you might see a link on a site and who knows if it was paid for or not. There's just really no way to tell.

I've sold a few text links on a couple of my websites and I get paid a couple dollars a month per link until it cancels and I get paid via PayPal (*hint* SAS *hint*)
You wouldn't know by looking at them that they were paid links.

[Trust]

That's the way to do it if you were going to do it.

An example, a blog. Most have blog rolls, other blogs or sites they link out to. I think most of the time they're just linking out to sites they like but you could have some paid ones in there and couldn't tell the difference.

Compare that to a blog with Text Links Ad banners and a lot of the times I see those very links on their site. Very easy to tell those were paid links for the sole purpose of getting PR/SE benefit.

And I myself have a couple of paid links on my site. Couple of merchants that contacted me and wanted to be on my site, had some coupons but they didn't have an affiliate program. So they pay a certain amount for a certain time and I link to them with whatever coupons they have available. It's mainly for the sales that might come via my site and they might get a little SEO benefit but nothing much at all from a PR2 page with lots of links out.

[loxly]

Yes trust, I have a screen capture of it I had two, but one was on the CafePress domain, so it really wasn't mine to claim. The second was linked from the CafePress one. It was PR9 for almost 2 months, during a Q4. Sales were nice, but not higher than the previous year when it was a PR6.

I have had several PR6 sites that don't get any more traffic than the PR3 sites.

[Snib]

I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but Google has more than doubled my traffic today. Sure hope it sticks for at least Q4

- Scott

[Vinny O'Hare]

Google doubled your traffic because they are skimming sites from the top that sold links. Your site moved up as has all mine

[AffiliateHound]

Originally Posted by nyfalcon

Google doubled your traffic because they are skimming sites from the top that sold links. Your site moved up as has all mine

Good Deal! Something from g that has helped us.

[Leader]

Originally Posted by Haiko de Poel, Jr.

I think G's keepin it real.

IMO they're keepin' it made out of the same stuff that goes in a compost pile, as always.

I agree with this, from the article:

2. Google is Out of Control
Google sells links and should not penalize others for selling them too. Why should Google be able to tell me how to link and whom to link to? What is wrong with linking and why should I have to put a no-follow tag on a link when I genuinely like a site? How does their algorithm know that I received payment for a link?

Google is simply out to crush competition. Don't they remember their roots? It was the webmasters who were the first adopters of Google's search engine. It was us who made you rich Google! One blogger called it a Google "***** slap!" Is Google retaliating against me for criticizing them in my blog?

And then some!

"Keepin it real!??" When if they followed their own guidelines, their own site couldn't exist?!? They wouldn't know Real if it was branded across their face!

[Leader]

As for the actual topic, I'm more interested in what (if anything) has happened to the SERP ranks. There are many threads here that basically say PR doesn't really mean much.

[AffiliateHound]

Originally Posted by Leader

As for the actual topic, I'm more interested in what (if anything) has happened to the SERP ranks. There are many threads here that basically say PR doesn't really mean much.

That's what we've been led to believe, but what about posts 14 & 15, and I can see an increase in refs from g in my sites as well.

[AffiliateHound]

Is it possible that some sites are getting some other direct penalty for the paid link issue, killing their SERPS, but that is unrelated to PR?

[Leader]

Originally Posted by AffiliateHound

That's what we've been led to believe, but what about posts 14 & 15, and I can see an increase in refs from g in my sites as well.

Who knows...but I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that whoever previously had high SERP ranks had been selling links. Many categories affs are active in have either other aff sites, or merchants, as the main competition--neither of which I'd expect to be too willing to do flat-rate link sales.

[AffiliateHound]

Originally Posted by Leader

Who knows...but I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that whoever previously had high SERP ranks had been selling links. Many categories affs are active in have either other aff sites, or merchants, as the main competition--neither of which I'd expect to be too willing to do flat-rate link sales.

Right. That's why I think it's surprising that there have been such noticable rises in SERPS for some, as I would have thought that the number of sites affected by this change would be a pretty small percentage.

[Rhea]

I came very close, a few months ago, to accepting an offer to place paid links on one of my web sites. In the end I just didn't feel it was a wise move and I declined the offer.

Page rank on that site has dropped but traffic has increased. Makes me wonder if Google is simply scaling PR differently since traffic hasn't been affected adversely.

[AffiliateHound]

Originally Posted by Rhea

Page rank on that site has dropped but traffic has increased. Makes me wonder if Google is simply scaling PR differently since traffic hasn't been affected adversely.

Like I said earlier, my g traffic is up but now I have seen that many of my PRs have dropped

[Trust]

It looks like a general lowering around the internet. I know there is a lot of talk that sites buying and selling links took a hit since Google has been talking about that lately and this is true in a lot of cases but this kind of thing has happened before. I remember something like this happening before where I can remember thinking, Wow, everybody's PR dropped. So if your traffic is still good, I wouldn't worry abut the little green in the bar. They could have just done it to discourage the buying and selling a little.

Seems like Text Links Ads got hit last month:
http://www.dailymoolah.com/2007/09/05/text-link-ads-deindexed-from-google/

And from Danny Sullivan:
Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
http://searchengineland.com/071007-173841.php