No More Text Link Ads and Paid Links?

The discussion about Google penalizing websites that sell text link ads has been going for a while. It looks like some stronger evidences are emerging, though.

Search Engine Land just published an article titled “Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank or Rankings on Google.” The article illustrates some high profile sites like the Stanford Daily, which saw its PR drop from 9 to 7, supposedly due to the the practice of selling text links. Here is a quotation:

Last week, I noticed the Stanford Daily had dropped from when I wrote the above in April to PR7 today. That’s a huge drop that has no apparent reason to happen. Some others were also reporting PageRank drops. So I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links.

In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached, to prevent them from ranking well.

It looks like there might be a PageRank update going on as well, and several sites that used to sell text link ads experienced a drop in PR (e.g., Entrepreneurs-Journey).

Personally I will follow Google’s guidelines on paid links. I might not agree with their policy completely, but I really do not feel in the position to risk getting penalized.

I am also starting to consider if my 125×125 sponsor ads should have the “nofollow” tag or not. But for the moment I will not change it since Search Engine Land itself and several other high profile blogs have the same setup.

Do you plan to keep selling text links on your website?