Google Adds “Selling Links” For PageRank To Link Schemes Page

Nov 23, 2007 at 8:33am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google Blogoscoped reports Google has updated one of their help pages to include the words “selling links” when discussing link schemes.

On the Why should I report paid links to Google? page, Google changed the document to add the words “selling links” through the page. One line now reads:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

What does Google recommend you do if you sell ads on your site?

(1) Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the anchor tag

(2) Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Postscript From Danny: I’d previously recommended that Google update their help pages to reflect PageRank penalties might now happen. Neither of the two key pages I’d highlighted were updated as part of this round of changes.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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