Has anyone here sold Page Rank?

[Curtis2011]

I recently realized that my business website has reached a nice little PR3 on its home page.

I thought this was hilarious as it is only 4 months old, and my acupuncture website is more than a year old with only PR1 on its home page

Anyways, I am just curious if anyone has ever sold "advertising" links that are really just selling Page Rank in disguise, and if so, what is your experience with it?

I don't want to be "unethical" - but if I found someone to "advertise" with a link from my home page that I actually thought had a good product, I wouldn't be against it.

Any thoughts?

[Lucidism]

I have done this. I currently do this. Be careful!

Google looks upon this as spam and your search engine placement could get hacked to death because of it. I have an associate who did it a few years back and his PageRank got slashed from a 6 to a 3. He lost thousands of visitors a day because of his lost Google rankings.

HOWEVER, I've done it for over a year on one of my sites and Google doesn't seem to care at all. I've had no negative consequence. One reason why might be because the sites I sold to were in the same niche as me, so it looks as if it's legit related content. And it is... somewhat.

The general rule of thumb is: as far as the link is RELEVANT to the site (same topic), the paid link is OK.

Links to BAD sites are huge no-no. Bad sites include: gambling sites, almost all drugs and pills sites, the like. Unless you run a poker site or something, in which case linking to gambling sites would make sense.

You want to exchange a few emails with the person you are considering to make sure he is not a spammer and just a random guy like us all. You don't want to sell link to a person who is involved into Spam because this will get you into the bad neighborhood. Look out for general flags: bad grammar, email style, etc.

[SatvikBeri]

You can very easily get Google slapped for this, for various reasons. For example, linking to "bad" pages can get you in trouble, and it's hard to tell what Google considers bad. Paid advertising is also generally considered negative.

In fact, I believe Google frowns upon ANY use of backlinks for the sake of SEO, their official policy is that they want sites to use backlinks only for the sake of traffic. I have no idea how or if they monitor this, but again, there has been a lot of Google Slapping going around lately.

[Curtis2011]

Originally Posted by Lucidism

Google looks upon this as spam and your search engine placement could get hacked to death because of it. I have an associate who did it a few years back and his PageRank got slashed from a 6 to a 3. He lost thousands of visitors a day because of his lost Google rankings.

Thanks for all the good advice..

On this note, my business website doesn't even have traffic to lose it is very young with low amount of content, and still very low visitor count right now.

[Rebecca800]

Hey Curtis,

It's in the Google rulebook that a paid link must have a "no follow" tag to stop you selling your Page Rank. Not worth the risk IF you did somehow get caught... Google is God! (hehe)

[Curtis2011]

Originally Posted by Rebecca800

Google is God! (hehe)

Lol... and SBI'ers are the saints!

Or.. the prophets?!

[darkun]

Originally Posted by Curtis2011

Lol... and SBI'ers are the saints!

Or.. the prophets?!

Hah!

What nobody has been able to explain to me is how Google would know I am receiving money for a link. I currently link to many useful sites that I think would benefit my readers. If one of those sites decided to start paying me, how would Google know.

Google states that all paid links must have the "nofollow" attribute, but what about the sites that I link to that appear (to a computer algorithm at least) to be of no relevance - I would naturally use the "nofollow" tag so as not to be penalised - so does Google assume that it is also a paid link?

It confuses me. I think there should be a separate attribute to differentiate between a paid link, and a link to a seemingly different niche that we don't necessarily want to be connected to.

El

[SatvikBeri]

Originally Posted by darkun

Hah!

What nobody has been able to explain to me is how Google would know I am receiving money for a link.

Google's algorithms are incredibly sophisticated, so this isn't exactly correct, but: it's more like Google has a list of bad sites, and if you link to a bad site without a nofollow tag, you'll be penalized.