Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 17 years 1 month 12 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
The entire search engine marketing industry is quaking in fear and speculation as you read this, and the organic ranking of many sites is now subject to penalty at Google’s whim.
The debate over paid links seems to be coming to a frenzied head this summer, especially since the SES San Jose paid links session called “Are Paid Links Evil?” in August.
It’s been nearly six full months since a Google Toolbar PageRank update now, and some people have speculated that this might even be the end of the green bar as we know it.
Webmasters are now reporting drops in ranking, and insiders at Google seem to be confirming that yes, not only are they trying to discount the value of paid links and the ranking benefit they may impart, but they are actually penalizing the organic search ranking of sites that sell links.
As of Friday, the official word from Google came down that selling links on your site can lead to a penalty. The key work there is “CAN”, because it’s not happening to everyone equally.
To fully understand what is going on and how this is changing the industry right before our very eyes, you really need to grab a cup of coffee and spend some time reading these three articles by Jennifer Laycock.
Okay, now that you’ve read those, you must have your own opinion, right? Well here’s mine…
This is total crap. The hypocrisy of Google “allowing” link sales and even spammy doorway pages from sites like Forbes, while penalizing the small site for making a few bucks is ridiculous. Even when BMW got penalized they were right back in a few days.
Cronyism and antitrust issues aside, the “FUD factor” – creating Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt – (as seen in Michael Gray’s SES San Jose presentatoion) seems to be the only weapon Google has at their disposal for influencing the behavior of te majority of Webmasters and in many cases, it’s working.
Way back in 2004, Jeremy Zawodny from Microsoft mentioned the “… increasingly PageRank driven advertising economy…” and the writing was on the wall even then. Has nobody at Google seen this coming?
By being based so heavily on a VISIBLE commodity, (the green PR bar) their search algorithm is flawed, and Google is powerless to stop it any other way.
Sure, they can identify the big networks that many of us have come to know and use, and those can and should be filtered out of the algorithm to improve the integrity of the search results. You can’t begrudge them that, since it’s their search engine and they should be able to do what they want.
Unfortunately, the hypocrisy factor is heavy, and in our world, money talks. Picking on the small guys while leaving the big sites unscathed seems to be acceptable. If Google had any real commitment to search integrity they would be applying this penalty evenly, but that’s just not the way the world works, I guess.
In my opinion the only thing that makes sense at this point is for Google to to remove the 
green PageRank indicator from the toolbar.
Even if that was just a temporary solution, while they continue to improve the algorithm, that would effectively shut down any incentive to buy links almost immediately.
As I said in my post a couple of weeks ago, asking if this was the end of visible PageRank…
“if you don’t want someone to sell something, then don’t consistently tell them how much it’s worth.”
Good call Scott.
Where is the petition? I’ll sign it!
Do you think we as internet users/professionals can knock Google off it’s high horse?
Yes, if I were in charge at Google, I would likely get rid of the “price sticker” on everybody’s website and pretty much end the sale of PR.
However, from a personal standpoint as an SEO, I do not want to see the green bar go away because it is a key factor in allowing us to intelligently research the competitions backlinks.
Maybe this is just a way for Google to make it harder to figure out the Google algorithm. The longer it takes between doing something to improve PR and the time you get feedback on that bar, the harder it will be to figure out what you did right or wrong.
The PR bar has always reflected at least 3 month old data the day it updates anyway, but maybe that does have something to do with it.
Not having it current does make ranking a little harder, because any calculation I make today of the value of a link is based on PR from February 2007.
However, I don’t really think Google wants to make things “harder” or they wouldn’t keep refining Webmaster Tools… They just want to stop us from being able to buy our way to the top unless we’re using Adwords.
I recently started a second blog for my real estate business mainly for listings. It is wordpress and new. A google search for my name has the new wordpress post on the first page and the google owned Blogger post nowhere around. It seems odd that blogger is not more efficient for obvious reasons. This proved to me how fast WordPress is rated on google.
As far as the penalty, on a fun blog I have I was #1 for a search result for a specific pop culture phrase. Last Friday I dropped to #2 and then completely off the search on Saturday. Monday I was back to #1. I wonder if I was penalized because I had posted similar comments on a bunch pop culture sites. Would that look like paid advertising or that the comments were very similar it discounted them? Either way I am back.
It’s very unlikely that what you did caused any penalty, because otherwise people would post about their competitors like that and hurt them.
More than likely, you were just seeing different Google datacenter results and your brand-new blog just isn’t ranking well on them all yet.
Yep, WordPress is SEO magic if done right!