There seems to be a buzz on at the moment that Google is punishing website publishers who sell links. It’s Google’s search engine and they can do whatever they want but I think they’ve gotten things terribly wrong here and here’s why…

• Google are punishing the wrong people - It’s the link buyers who may be attempting to manipulate the SERPs and PR, not the sellers. If the big G can work out who are selling links then I’m sure they can come up with some way to figure out who’s buying them. It’s likely that sellers are already penalised because of an increase in outbound links on their site anyway.
• Not all link sales are meant to mess with Google’s methods - In the offline world SERPs and PR don’t exist but advertising is still sold in the bazillions. How can this be, you ask? Because the whole point of advertising is to get people to buy a product or service and that still applies to the online world. I wish someone would tell Google that not all links sales are based around finding evil and sneaky ways to beat their system.
• PR has no point - As far as I can tell, having a high PR doesn’t always equate to a better ranking in the SERPs. So what’s it’s purpose? It seems like the only point of PR is to help in determining how much people should pay when buying links (or websites). Ditching PR might throw the whole system into disarray and possibly even cause the internet to explode but at least it’d be harder to value links and maybe fewer people will buy them. Or not. Just a mad theory or mine.
• Google can’t own the whole internet (can they?) - Direct link sales puts all of the money into the webmaster’s pocket. Google doesn’t get any piece of the pie and they don’t like that. It also means there’s a little bit less of a chance the reader will click on Adsense, and it probably also reduces the amount that businesses are willing to spend of their marketing budget on Adwords. One wonders whether their aim is really to keep the integrity of their search system or if it’s more of an attempt to control as much of the internet’s advertising income as they possibly can. Things that make you go hmm.
• Punishing sites will compromise Google’s search results - Lots of sites selling links are of a good quality and if Google starts lowering PR and knocking them down the SERPs because they sell links then their search engine will start to lose some good results from the main pages and the user will suffer as a result.
• They’re not the boss of me, man - It’s my site and I’ll do whatever I want with it. I rely on The Goog for a lot of my traffic and if I ever got banned from their search engine it would be game over, but I guess that’s life. I’m not willing to let them tell me how to do business on websites that I’ve spent a zillion hours creating.

Try as they might, Google can’t control every aspect of the internet but it doesn’t look like that’s going to stop them from trying. For the love of god how much higher can their share price go?? Let us little people have a few crumbs, will ya?

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