Google’s PageRank Update Goes After Paid Links?

Seems like there is a PageRank update taking place now that seems to be impacting sites that sell links. Can’t say that we were not warned about this. Danny Sullivan wrote Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google over two weeks ago, and now it appears many sites are getting […]

Seems like there is a PageRank update taking place now that seems to be impacting sites that sell links. Can’t say that we were not warned about this. Danny Sullivan wrote Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google over two weeks ago, and now it appears many sites are getting hit with a drop in PageRank.

Here is a list of some sites, including major publishers, who seem to have taken a hit overnight:

I am sure there are many more. Is this a direct hit against sites that sell paid links? That is too hard to say for sure.

There is a lot of buzz about this around the blogosphere. Here are some of the blog posts:


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About the Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

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