A reminder about selling links that pass PageRank

Friday, February 22, 2013

Google has said for years that
selling links that pass PageRank
violates our
quality guidelines.
We continue to
reiterate that guidance periodically
to help
remind site owners and webmasters
of that policy.

Please be wary if someone approaches you and wants to pay you for links or “advertorial” pages on
your site that pass PageRank. 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. The consequences can also include
lower rankings for that site in Google’s search results.

If you receive a warning for selling links that pass PageRank in Google’s
Webmaster Tools,
you’ll see a notification message to look for “possibly artificial or unnatural links on your site
pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank.” That’s an indication that
your site has lost trust in Google’s index.

To address the issue, make sure that any paid links on your site don’t pass PageRank. You can
remove any paid links or advertorial pages, or make sure that any paid hyperlinks have the
rel="nofollow" attribute.
After ensuring that no paid links on your site pass PageRank, you can submit a
reconsideration request
and if you had a manual webspam action on your site, someone at Google will review the request.
After the request has been reviewed, you’ll get a notification back about whether the
reconsideration request was granted or not.

We do take this issue very seriously, so we recommend you avoid selling (and buying) links that
pass PageRank in order to prevent loss of trust, lower PageRank in the Google Toolbar, lower
rankings, or in an extreme case, removal from Google’s search results.

Posted by
Matt Cutts,
Distinguished Engineer