The paid links market has been a bug with Google for some time now. Namely some sites which had a high PageRank (and a great many which did not) would enter the paid link market and start selling links at a monthly cost.
One prime example was (and still is though maybe not for much longer) The Stanford Daily which sells links for $350 each per month. The Stanford Daily used to enjoy a PageRank of 9 and it was not slow to capitalise on this.
The paid links market has been a bug with Google for some time now. Namely some sites which had a high PageRank (and a great many which did not) would enter the paid link market and start selling links at a monthly cost.
One prime example was (and still is though maybe not for much longer) The Stanford Daily http://daily.stanford.edu/ which sells links for $350 each per month. The Stanford Daily used to enjoy a PageRank of 9 and it was not slow to capitalise on this.
Google has been looking at sits which engage in the practise of selling links for some time now trying to decide whether it would let things be or start to penalise. At the beginning of this year the paid links market seemed to get out of hand with spam sites and link farms springing up unchecked all over the place and a great many legitimate sites beginning to dip a toe in the market in the belief that easy money was to be had from it.
In April Google updated its algorithm and tested it and then in August it applied the changes. The result? The Stanford Daily saw its PageRank drop from 9 to 7 for no apparent reason and virtually overnight (they have since worked hard to raise it to 8). Google have now officially come out and specified that if you are in the market to sell links they will eventually spot your site, penalise it and may even drop it entirely from their index.
Because, at this point, I have already discussed with webmasters whether Google have the moral right to dictate what they do with their online business I will reiterate the argument: Google have publicly committed themselves to delivering the most relevant results possible in the shortest possible time.
Their entire business model and dominance of the search engine market rests on this seemingly simple premise. It is therefore extremely short-sighted of webmasters to think that Google would jeopardise that so that they can make a fast buck out of the search engine. In addition, if you are manipulating your site’s PageRank artificially in this fashion the chances are you are not really delivering the one thing that will give you lasting results: high-value content, naturally.
