Link Sellers Lost Pagerank, but What About the Link Buyers?

• Posted by B Jones on November 16th, 2007 - Comment on this Post »

Recently, several established sites, including SEOlogs, were affected by Google’s paid links/ link selling penalty. From my experience, and also what I gathered from others who had the same experience, It wasn’t much of a penalty. No one really saw any drop in traffic or rankings. Just a drop in visible Pagerank.

What I didn’t really hear about though, was any sites getting penalized for selling links. Maybe there were, but I couldn’t hear it over all the noise about people loosing Pagerank.

Well, today, this Sphinn story really got my attention: Shopzilla paying to get paid links removed.

Basically, this blogger was contacted by Shopzilla.com with several requests to remove a paid post that was purchased via PayPerPost from his site.

Then yesterday I got another mail from them saying that they will give me $100 if I remove the mail before noon. I was about to remove the link but didn’t remove the link because I didn’t get time for that. But in the second mail they were offering me $100 for the removal of the link.

Now I can’t say what exactly is going on with Shopzilla, but if a website of that size is taking an action as drastic as actually paying people to remove paid links, there must be a really good reason for it.

I’m guessing that those on the buying end of this penalty are seeing more than just a Pagerank drop. Even if the penalty cut traffic from Google to Shopzilla by 1/3 or 1/2, that could mean a drop in profits of tens of thousands of dollars per day, and that sort of thing would definitely be worth doing whatever it took to get back into Google’s good favor.

One of the websites I manage (I’m not the owner) brings in daily, more than many people make in a year. The site gets a little less than 1/3 of all its traffic from Google. Several months back,(within 1 hour (verry sudden)) we lost over 1/2 of all traffic from Google. Though Google traffic doesn’t convert as well as our other traffic sources, that loss still meant meant thousands of dollars per day.

Needless to say, for the next 2 weeks, everything else took a back seat to finding out exactly what the problem was, and correcting it.

Fortunately, we were able to correct the problem by coming up with a list of things that could have potentially caused the penalty, and fixing all of them. Traffic returned, and when it did, it came as suddenly as it was lost (within one hour).

If your site or company stands to loose big from a Google penalty, I’d definitely take note of this. Big “white listed” sites don’t have to sweat the small stuff as much as other sites, but they are NOT immune. Google will not hesitate to slap you.

If this situation is what it looks like, it would probably be a good time to take a good look at where your links are coming from. Try to correct (or hide) anything that could come back to bite you. It’s also a good idea to diversify your traffic sources. Too much traffic from one source == too many eggs in one basket == bad. Diversify.

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