Do you know that selling links that pass PageRank violates Google’s quality guidelines? As such Matt Cutts, a Distinguished Engineer at Google says, “We continue to reiterate that guidance periodically to help remind site owners and webmasters of that policy.”
Cutts advises all website owners that they should turn away people who approach them with an objective of wanting to pay them for links or “advertorial” pages on their site that pass PageRank.
He warned, “Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action on such violations.
“The consequences for a linkselling site start with losing trust in Google’s search results, as well as reduction of the site’s visible PageRank in the Google Toolbar.”
Adhering to any of the above scenarios has a negative impact; the consequences can also include lower rankings for that site in Google’s search results. Website owners, who get an alert for selling links that pass PageRank in Google’s Webmaster Tools, will see a notice which instructs them to look for “possibly artificial or unnatural linked on their site pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank.” The above is an indication that your site has lost confidence in Google’s index.
How can you rectify this problem?
Web owners should make it a point that any paid links on their site don’t pass PageRank; they should also get rid of any paid links or advertorial pages, or make sure that any paid hyperlinks have the rel=”nofollow” attribute. If you are quite sure that no paid links on your site pass PageRank, you can put forward a reconsideration request. Web owners with a manual webspam action on their site will get their request reviewed by someone at Google. When the request has been reviewed, a notification will be sent back to the website owner regarding whether the consideration request was granted or not.
Cutts added, “We do take this issue seriously, so we recommend you avoid selling (and buying) links that pass PageRank in the Google Toolbar, lower rankings, or in an extreme case, removal from Google’s search results.”
Source: https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/02/a -reminder-about-selling-links.html
