You CAN Lose Your Page Rank Selling Links - It is Official!
December 13, 2007 | Author: Rob | Filed under: SEO and Marketing
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It’s official and it’s on video. Matt Cutts infamous Google engineer and representative stated on a video interview with WebProNews at PubCon that selling links can cause you to lose your page rank if Google becomes aware of it.
Here is the Video of Matt Cutts Google representative discussing how selling links can cause you to lose your page rank.
Let’s think about this logically and rationally for a second. Before page rank came around if you wanted to make money online it was like most other offline businesses. You needed to produce value. This could be in the form of selling a product and or service. It could also be by selling traffic on your blog or website through mediums like adsense, kontera, adbrite and the list goes on.
Suddenly Google released Page Rank and people began selling this artificial product as though it was their own and they could do as they pleased with it. I have news for you…
Google gave you the page rank as a relevance score. If you sell that page rank by giving links that don’t belong on your site linkage you’re site isn’t as relevant as it was before and most importantly you’re messing with / diluting the relevance of googles search engine!!
Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. Google bestows a relevancy via page rank to your blog / website then you sell it which only harms the company that gave it to you… Do you see what is wrong with this picture? Can you see why Google doesn’t like / allow this practice? If you are going to sell advertising for the sake of traffic just throw a “nofollow” but let them know.
So keep blogging or making websites on your niche and use new and established mediums to generate sales or traffic that you sell to people who have a product to sell to your niche. It’s been discussed that page rank doesn’t play a major factor in determining search engine results but it does undeniably play a factor. It also gives you credibility.
I think alot of people who got into blogging / web development simply to make a quick buck. (The quick buck crew or QBC) I think most QBC’s will go elsewhere as for the most part the page rank selling game is coming to a close for anyone who values the long term effectiveness of their website.
Sure you COULD make a few hundred or a few thousand dollars over a short period of time selling page rank but if you’re running a legitimate web business why risk it? The web isn’t going anywhere and your site will be around in 2008, 2009, 2010 etc… A few hundred dollars over 1 month is great. A few hundred dollars total over a few years is lousy at best.
That isn’t to say you should be paranoid about linking to other sites. Just link to sites that are relevant. Build a website or blog that benefits the end user and the search engines will reward you with trust and ultimately visitors. Think about what kind of electronic product you can produce to sell to your niche. If you can’t maybe you need another niche?
To sum things up if you sell page rank which was never really yours to begin with you’ll most likely pay the consequences sooner or later. To end this post if you still aren’t convinced(I think hearing it from Matt Cutts mouth itself should have been enough) read what John Chow says about Google Going After PayPerPost and watch this video by ShoeMoney that is properly titled “Don’t Make Google Look Stupid - Period.”
This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 and is filed under SEO and Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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2 people have left comments
I appreciate the article and I would have to agree that relevance is the final word.
We all expect to find relevant information when we use the search engines and a site full of links that are not on topic is SPAM as far as I’m concerned.
Jason Mallory
www.ABC-HomeBusiness.com
Indeed. Most of us that now routinely use Google as our search engine started elsewhere… Why did we switch to Google in the first place? Relevant search results!