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.
I’ll keep them.
I guess it was a good decision after all to separate my blogs.
If my blog with TLA gets zero-pageranked or gets no TLA advertisers, it does not affect my main blog which has no advertising whatsoever.
Whoah how much are you guys getting off TLA??? I am currently using AdSense and I am getting crap off of it. Maybe my blog is just not that popular :(
The income from such links are so irresistable. I hope TLA link rates won’t get affected. As of now, initial investigations does not show that the PR penalty affects Search Engine Rankings that much.
Although it might be too early to tell yet, I’ve made some before and after ranking comparisons and so far, rankings seems not that affected.
http://www.searchengine-weblog.com/50226711/does_the_recent_google_pr_penalty_affect_search_engine_rankings.php
Google PR is one of the parameters that TLA uses to know how much a link would be sold. So, if your PR drop then your earnings would drop too. Am I right?
I can’t let go of TLA right now, it’s helping a lot with my school fees. :(
When my Adsense earning surpasses my TLA income, maybe. But until then, I’ll be saying yes to the moolah. And coincidentally, my traffic went up when Google slashed my PR.
It’s hard to resist those moolah :)
I would say most publishers will continue to do it. Dropping of PR is actually predicted long time ago, but publishers don’t listen.
What’s scary now is, google can slowly remove those sites on their SERP.