Will you continue selling links and reviews ?
October 31, 2007 by martin
Filed under links, make money
Google decided to punish websites that are selling text links that are casting votes at the same time, which means that all sites not using the nofollow link attribute are in danger of loosing their current Pagerank. This puts services like Text-Link-Ads, ReviewMe and Linkshare into serious danger.
It remains to be seen if they will start adding nofollow link attributes to the links that they sell but it does not look that way at the moment. Only the visible Pagerank is currently decreased which has no effect on search engine rankings.
What I don’t like is that it could very well be that Google decides that this punishment is not enough and decreases those rankings as well to further punish webmasters who are selling links. No one knows for sure and once the webmaster community finds out it is to late to react.
Some sites were punished for links that they had months ago but removed since then from their website. I would like to see a little bit more transparency here.
Why is a site getting punished and what should the site owner do to reverse the punishment ?
Many webmasters will most likely remove their websites, at least the ones that depend on Google, from Text-Link-Ads and the like. A PR4 site making some money from selling text links getting just a handful of visitors from search engines will most likely continue selling links. A site with thousands of visitors from search engines and an Google Adsense account most likely will not.
What is your stance on the matter ? Will you continue to sell links and reviews on your website ?
A Real Example
I thought I start my daily posts with my own example - How I became someone who is making good money with blogs and websites. It all started by coincidence, really. A friend of mine created a software which he wanted to supply freely and I decided to create a blog for that software. I added adsense to the site without really knowing what I was doing. The same day my website made it to the front page of digg.com which happened to send thousands of users to my site at that day.
The result was a steady flow of visitors from digg and other websites that wrote a story about my blog and the program. I made more than $80 the first day with google adsense. The income decreased in the coming days but I was so motivated by this coincidence that I decided to read and learn more about money making. I probably would have quit some weeks later if my site would not have made it to the homepage of digg.