Page Rank Question | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

in theory, there are certain paid link deals that they would have no way of knowing – but my hunch is that as they find out who is selling text-links by having other webmasters report them and going undercover and asking publishers to sell them a textlink  (both of which, I've heard they do) – they find out some of the common players in the industry and then can make some likely assumptions about which textlinks are legit and which are paid 

Suba @ Wealth Informatics said:

KNS Financial said:

They may say that they don't penalize for accepting pay for textlinks, but too many bloggers have had their PR drop significantly while every metric associated with links and traffic were growing. The only change was that they started posting these links.

I always wonder how they can tell the difference between someone posting a list of favorite blogs/websites, helpful resources for their readers, and textlinks.

So, is pagerank they way that they determine your position in search results? Meaning, I write about the biblical perspective on finances (among other things), so does Bob (Christian PF); if we write about the same topic, will he always rank higher because he has a higher PR?

I guess you can tell that I have a lot to learn about this stuff. Thanks to everyone for humoring my questions.

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Khaleef,
They DO penalize for accepting pay for textlinks. All I am saying is they don't penalize you for accepting advertisements and marking them as a nofollow. There is a difference. They do have algorithms to detect paid links. I have no idea how they see which is paid and which is not, but they have been reasonably good in doing that (in my limited and humble opinion). Here is the answer straight from the horse's mouth – http://www.google.com/support/…..swer=66736

So, is pagerank they way that they determine your position in search
results? Meaning, I write about the biblical perspective on finances
(among other things), so does Bob (Christian PF); if we write about the
same topic, will he always rank higher because he has a higher PR?

It is not just as straight forward as this. Page rank is "one" of the factors, it was the main factor when they started but they have evolved. So if Bob has all the other things right according to them for one post and you have very high quality links from relevant sites saying yours is a great post, you will rank high for that post. They do penalize people selling/buying links, they even have a reporting system as you can see from the link.

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Hey Suba, thanks for linking to that article from Google. I'm assuming that if we insist on only using "no follow" links, then advertisers would no longer be interested. It does lead to a tough decision.

Financial Samurai said:

"The greatest thing we have done is convince people we rule and police the Internet, even the one's who don't earn anything from the Internet." said one of my good friends who is a VP at Google. He is bright.

@Mike SMT – Given your beliefs, can you kindly take yourself off the waiting list in one of the txt link campaigns to give someone else a chance? Thx!

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Ok, after discussing with Sam off-forum I think I need to clarify a bit.  My earlier post about BMW was not about advertising/text links, but rather the question of whether or not google has the ability to penalize a site.  The BMW example has nothing to do with advertising…it was about using redirects to show one page to the search engines and another to human visitors. Here's an article from Matt Cutts of Google that goes into a bit more detail…

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/…..l-webspam/

My interpretation is that Google has the ability to remove sites from it's index if it feels they are engaging in shady activities.  Though since I don't work for Google I can't say that is fact, just opinion based on what I've read.

But it wasn't my intention to imply that advertising would fall under the umbrella of "shady activity" or that it should be avoided.   Websites big and small accept advertising, and it is a profitable way to monetize your site. 

I do accept advertising on my blog, and I do believe we should have the freedom to do whatever we want on a blog that we own. 

Mike