Finally a penalty with some teeth for selling links
This just in from DaveN that he has an example and a confirmation from Google that they’ve actually done more than a visible PageRank reduction for a link seller.
It all started when Dave posted about a friend’s site that was no longer showing for it’s money keywords, in his words:
…because I know where they used to rank for t-shirt printing
The assumption was that they’ve done nothing spammy to deserve the penalty.
Matt Cutts stopped by to add:
“what do you do when you know you haven’t do anything wrong, but Google still gives you a penalty”
e-examine your assumptions? E.g. http://web.archive.org/web/20070817163057/http://www.indigoclothing.com/blog/ is a link that shows when they were selling links. Later versions of their site were selling even more links, e.g. “sexy underwear” links.
Google has been very clear about how we feel about selling/buying links. If indigoclothing.com has dropped their text link ads and remove the links that they sold, they could do a reconsideration request. According to the data I looked at, the site has never done a reconsideration request.
So now we can get on with the business of actually earning links now that Google is actually going to start reducing the rankings of sites selling links. The visible PageRank reduction caused quite a stir, but in the end all I kept reading about it was that peoples rankings and traffic didn’t change. Sort of a non-penalty.
A quick check of the web’s most notorious link seller shows them still indexed and still ranking. Google must be going after the small time TLA sites first before tackling the worst offenders. Google still recommends buying links from Yahoo! in their guidelines, but those are slow to update as the help for the Reconsideration Request still says it’s for deindexed sites:
If your site is not included in Google’s search results, and you believe that it does not violate our webmaster guidelines, you can ask Google to reconsider your site for inclusion in the index.
This is clearly not the case as shown by this very example.
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