The Wrath of Google: PageRank Cuts for Link Sellers

A lot of blogs earn money by selling links. Whether you are working with PayPerPost, TextLinkAds or selling links on your own, it’s a good way to earn some cash with your blog and it is often a far sight more money than AdSense. While some bloggers do earn well with Adsense, there are plenty out there who don’t and these folks need text links to survive. But now, Google has made good on its threats to punish anyone who sells links on their blog.

In the past week, a variety of huge blogs, including JohnChow.com, CourtneyTuttle.com and Statcounter have all been penalized for selling text links. How? Their PageRank plummeted, one point in most cases, two in other cases. Now, this wasn’t actual PageRank, but toolbar PageRank, which is bad enough. Bloggers the blogosphere over are considering this a warning shot . . . the next round of punishments will likely be harsher.

So, how does this affect smaller blogs, especially those who have been waiting for PageRank in order to be able to take on higher paying text links? No one is exactly sure yet. It may be that we will be able to simply add no-follow links and continue to sell our ad links . . . that remains to be seen. You see, the apparent problem here is that people buy text links from bloggers in order to siphon off PageRank juice. While this may not always be true, it is how Google is looking at blogs for now and that means we have to be careful.

For the moment, bloggers are becoming rather paranoid and most are stopping all sales until further notice. While this is probably a good idea, it could mean drastic loss of income for anyone who makes their living off text links. At the same time, it may cause the value of text links to go up temporarily . . . a good thing for anyone willing to say “screw Google” and continue on with this type of money earning method.

Even if you decide to continue selling text links, it is advisable to go underground, at least for now. Take down your advertising page and make potential link clients contact you by email, since Google appears to be checking this. You may want to make your links unobtrusive and not obviously sponsored links, as well, though this is deemed pretty sneaky by blog readers.

In the end, whether we like it or not, Google pretty much has a dictatorship and can make these kinds of wide-scale changes that affect us all. One can only hope that there will be a solution presented shortly so bloggers the world over can continue earning with text links.