Matt Cutts & John Mueller Discussion About Selling Links Can Lead To PageRank Penalty
Yesterday, Matt Cutts and John Mueller of Google both replied the similar query on PageRanL penalties for selling links without knowing the other answered them. It has been a while since a Google talked about selling links and the penalty associated with it, so to have two Googlers address it the similar day is a special day.
Matt Cutts already posted it on this personal SEO blog, post title why did my pagerank go decline. In short, the site was selling links that passed PageRank and however Google lower the PageRank of the site and trusts the links less on the site. This is nothing new, covered it lots of times.
John Mueller replied it also on a Google Hangout, about 40 minutes 32 seconds in on this video, I will put it below and you can see he call Barry Schwartz out a bit.
Before anybody begins yelling their heads off at me, do so on this post and not here.
Google added the terms to their webmaster guidelines and has done videos on the subject.
Matt Cutts shared the email he sent to the publisher about why their PageRank dropped. In short, he said “PageRank drops by 30-50%” typically are due to “selling links that pass PageRank.” Matt went on to explicate they found, not sure if it was automatically or manually, links labeled “sponsored that passed PageRank.” Matt added that Google “received an outside spam report about your site” with details on different paid links on other sections of the web site.
