The Search Engine Roundtable blog confirms that the recent PR adjustments where targeting raw paid links. An email response from Google Search Quality Engineer Matt Cutts puts all speculations to rest.
But the question remains…
Will you stop selling raw link now? Much more so that it’s out in the open that Google is penalizing those who sell links for PR. Will you remove your TLA links?
Matt Cutts’ email was short and concise:
The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.
One can only wonder how much that would affect blogs that don’t get much traffic and only rely on link ads for a majority of their blog income.
So, will you be letting go of those paid links just to please the gods and deities?
For those who are giving in to the force, just drop your paid links and submit a reconsideration request from the Google Webmaster Tool.
i don’t really think Google is making a good move denying publishers the liberty to sell links in their sites… in my view, Google sucks in this regard. They want to dominate the advertising world by cutting off other ads network.