I don't like it. Not one bit. This policy raises barriers to entry and creates a land mine type trap for the entrepreneurially inclined but technically uninformed. It is impossible for Google to enforce this policy evenly and fairly and it forces them into a catch as can behind the eight-ball mode.

Of course it is Google's search engine and they get to make the rules. It kind of reminds me of WWII slogans like "Loose Lips Sink Ships" and highway signs that encourage you to report litter bugs. As The Kinks sang on their very bestest song, "Parinoia the destroyer."

The Stanford Daily is a good example of this. In my Time For Google To Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links? post from earlier this year, I looked at how the student newspaper of Stanford University was continuing to sell links despite widespread attention to its actions and without any penalty being imposed by Google...

Last week, I noticed the Stanford Daily had dropped from when I wrote the above in April to PR7 today.

For the same reason, Google is only decreasing the PageRank for a subset of the sites they actually know about.

• human review seems to be key, and
• outing would likely lead to human review,
• and the penalty can be as devastating as being dropped from the search engine...

@me - I found an example of a very old resource site (an authority on a particular OS) that has been publicly referenced for selling links to poker sites (contextually irrelevant) and will keep an eye on their PR (it's still a 9 :).

Similarly, it doesn't have a problem with any links that are sold and delivered through JavaScript in a way that search engines won't index them.

Two, taking a step back, our goal is not to catch one hundred percent of paid links. It's to try to address the egregious behavior of buying and selling the links that focus on the passing of PageRank. That type of behavior is a lot more readily identifiable then I think people give us credit for.

That's one of those things where typically you know it when you see it. As I mentioned, our interest isn't in finding and taking care of a hundred percent of links that may or may not pass PageRank. But, as you point out relevance is definitely important and useful, and if you previously bought or sold a link without Nofollow, this is not the end of the world. We are looking for larger and more significant patterns.

But it seems beyond asinine for google to penalize others for doing what google earns virtually all their money doing.

For the same reason, Google is only decreasing the PageRank for a subset of the sites they actually know about.

but at the end of day, I'd hope the majority of folks here would agree with our goals of aiming for a more leval playing field on the web as well as a greater surfacing of quality content.

• It's Google's search engine. They have every right to say that if you sell links, they might penalize you.
   
• Google is not telling people what to do with their sites, which is a popular argument point. Google is telling people what to do if they are concerned about doing better in Google. Don't want to be harmed in Google? Don't sell links.
   
• Don't care about Google? Sell links all you want.

It's a good idea, but let's end users may misinterpret the red bar and associate it with malware.
It's really great that Google really acts on paid links, at least those sold for the sole purpose of improving organic rankings. Now I wonder if they will also effectively penalize buyers.

Danny,

I, like many others, have huge respect for your unbiased and well-informed views, but your take on Google in this article strikes me as one-sided.

"It's Google's search engine... Google is not telling people what to do with their sites... Don't care about Google? Sell links all you want."

Yes, it's their search engine, but not their traffic. People will want to look for medical info, shop for products, get the latest news regardless of Google. All the informational need, all the shopping intent, all the socializing urge exists regardless of Google.

That is, the traffic you, I or anybody receives from Google is not "free traffic courtesy of Google". It's not something they produced, and then handed over to us as some generous gift. This is one of the most insidious misconceptions regarding Google that happily goes around unnoticed and un-dissected. Even in Search Engine Land, unfortunately.

That is pre-existing traffic/intent looking for the services, products, knowledge or news you or I offer. Google only gets to aggregate and re-route it according to its own taste.

They aggregate it through a strong service, but increasingly also through a formidable brand name and near-ubiquity.

I cannot afford not to care for Google, because a large part of the traffic that is "looking for me" goes through them. Most websites cannot afford not to care, for the same reason.

So Google actually is telling me what to do with my website, simply because it has "hijacked" a part of "my" traffic, so it can blackmail me. (I have put "hijacked" in quotes, because obviously, the way they do it is neither illegal or unethical, but I have deliberately not put "blackmail" in quotes in the same sentence, because that's where what their actions do begin to look just that - illegal and unethical.)

As long as it penalizes websites by taking away their ranking-juice passing abilities, Google can argue that it is simply increasing the quality of its product (the SERP) by restoring relevancy. As soon as it starts to take away rankings wholesale from sites, it is actually decreasing the quality of its own product by harming its relevancy.

When you begin to punish entities even at the price of hurting yourself, that's something very similar to mindless vengeance. It's unethical. And if those entities have not done anything illegal, then it can be argued that punishing them becomes illegal. Which is exactly what Google is doing.

Do you or anybody really find it a healthy development that a hundred-billion dollar corporation increasingly displays a vindictive streak, and gets to threaten other market players based on the enormous market power it enjoys?

What a load of crap!  Many of us sell advertising in order to cover our overhead costs (servers, staff, web design, etc), and now Google is going to penalize people selling links?  It just doesn't seem right, now does it?

And how about that PageRank update, is it EVER going to happen?  We're going on 6 months here already!!

1. Block Google with robots.txt, as Halfdeck suggests
2. Stop searching with Google

• Google is robbing sites of money
• Google is telling sites what to do
• Google is trying to control the web
• Google is so bad it needs site owners to police links

• Google is not preventing links from being sold; it's only asking that paid links use nofollow as a way to prevent pollution of search results
• Site owners should have no problem with nofollow if people just want links for traffic
• Site owners complaining about nofollow are doing so because they know lots of people want links just to game the search engines
• Google thinks votes (ie links) should be earned, not bought

@dannysullivan

You say you'd be upset if you couldn't be found for your own name. This is exactly what I was talking about, and this is what is happening to a lot of sites.

True, for generic keywords, everything is subjective. I'm not arguing that thisandthatwebsite.com has a birthright for the #1 position of, say, the keyword "mesothelioma". But it does have a birthright for the #1 position when people search for "thisandthatwebsite.com".

Because when it comes to one's own unique name, the whole thing suddenly becomes objective. And here's a very important line Google crossed with its penalties. It's the line between "we improve our search service by discounting manipulation" and "we don't even care about hurting our own relevancy as long as in the process we can break the neck of somebody we don't like".

That's why I was talking about a vindictive streak. And it doesn't just "suck", as you put it. It's unethical at the least.

And I find it ominous that the penalties Google imposes on sites grow ever tougher, while the criteria for doing so become ever murkier, with an increasing danger for being unfairly punished. ('Cos it cannot really get any more error-prone than with paid link detection...)

This is no surprise.  I have sat in the "paid links are evil" at SES and cringed as search engine marketers (in my words not theirs as I cannot recall their exact words) told Matt Cutts to get over it paid links were here to stay and move on to something else.  Matt Cutts with his usual grace and style calmly told them and the audience again and again that this was coming. I never agreed with this session running in the first place it was sheer defiance and one person even suggested if they were serious to ban the biggest seller of links.  They did.  Its hard for people to accept that Google can exert this much power and affect their livelihood but reality is they can and they do. 

The biggest issue for me  now is that Matt and his spam team needs to talk to the Adwords team and create a consistent approach to this issue.  Its sheer hypocrisy to allow the site they banned for selling text link ads to pay to sell the service on Adwords, plus the dozens of other sites doing the same thing.  This in my opinion is just wrong and there is now a huge credibility gap in Google's approach.  For the sake of the adverse PR this is going to create they need to formulate a cohesive approach and back Matt up or they are going to have to take the fall out.

I've been in a closet lately, heavily immersed in some projects. As such, I have not kept abreast with the whole selling links issue (nor many other common SEO debates). For me, all the focus has been on developing high-quality websites and great content for those that I personally run.

Well this week Google has pretty much smacked me in the face for all the effort. I have sold a couple dozen links over the last few years--but those few links are always targeted by a customer on a specific page. Out of thousands of pages on my sites, there are only a couple dozen links that were there as a result of a sale. I have no fear of being honest about that--as long as a customer isn't selling something unethical... why should anyone be afraid of selling them a link?

Well it looks like Google feels differently than I do. My onetime PR6 site has now dropped to a PR2 (though the PR was more recently a 4-5 through this year).

http://www.shawnolson.net/a/1383/google-page-rank-woes.html

I agree with most of Google's motive behind this. But as someone who always keeps high standards in mind, I feel that their efforts are misdirected.

• Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file