Google Dishes Out PageRank Penalties To UK Newspaper Web Sites For Selling Links

Google has downgraded the Toolbar PageRank scores for several dozen UK operated newspapers and news sites today.

It is believed the reason Google has downgraded their PageRank scores is because they were selling links on a massive scale.

Google Penalizes Sites Selling Links

As you may remember, in October 2007, Google went on record that selling links can hurt your PageRank and rankings in Google. Shortly later, Google went ahead dished out PageRank penalties to many US news sites including sites like the Washington Post, Forbes, Sun Times and dozens of others.

This is nothing new. Google has and continues to penalize sites by dropping their PageRank score and lowering their Google search rankings for selling links. They do this both algorithmically and manually, and nowadays often notifying the link sellers via Webmaster Tools of the penalty. The fix is easy, they pull the paid links – which is what most of the news publishers did back in 2007.

Google Penalizes Sites Buying Links

It should come as no surprise that Google will often also penalize the sites buying the links. In fact, we reported of the hundreds of thousands of notifications Google sends to webmasters each month 3% are link related, 2% for buying links and 1% for selling links.

This morning, we reported that Interflora was penalized in Google, possibly for buying links. Google did not comment, but Anthony Shapley dug into the situation and posted what he thinks really happened.

Google Penalized Dozens Of UK News Sites

Google has lowered the PageRank score of dozens of news sites and blogs in the UK for selling links. Anthony found that Interflora had recent links on 150+ regional news sites all over the UK, all in the form of advertisements within articles. In addition, he said through back channels he was able to confirm that some of these sites did indeed get a notification via Google Webmaster Tools for selling links.

Finally, Anthony plotted the PageRank scores from before and after today, showing all of these sites had their PageRank scores lowered to zero.

Honestly, typically PageRank scores do not drop to zero for linking selling. They normally drop 3 or 4 digits but not to zero. So this move to drop the PageRank score to zero is somewhat a new action by Google.

Examples Of Paid Ads On News Sites:

Here is a listing of some of the articles that were added to news sites in the past few months to try to artificially boost the ranking of Interflora in Google. Who was responsible is not known.

• example 1
• example 2
• example 3
• example 4

There are hundreds of example stories but those are just a few.

Google Subtly Confirms The Penalty

Google’s Matt Cutts, head of search spam, posted a reminder on the Google Webmaster Central blog at 3pm EDT that selling links that pass PageRank can lead to a penalty. Clearly this is Google talking about the case with Interflora because Matt Cutts specifically talks about “advertorial” pages. Here is what Matt wrote:

Please be wary if someone approaches you and wants to pay you for links or “advertorial” pages on your site that pass PageRank. Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action on such violations. The consequences for a link selling site start with losing trust in Google’s search results, as well as reduction of the site’s visible PageRank in the Google Toolbar. The consequences can also include lower rankings for that site in Google’s search results.

For more details, see our new story on using advertorials for passing PageRank.

Related Stories:

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• Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty
• Google Now Reports “Practically 100%” Of Manual Actions
• Official: Google On How & When Ranking Penalties Are Removed
• Google Reminds Webmasters: Selling Links Can Lead To PageRank Penalty
• Matt Cutts On Penalties Vs. Algorithm Changes, A Disavow-This-Link Tool & More
• Got A Google Penalty? A Workflow For Managing Google Penalties
• 90 Days Later, J.C. Penney Regains Its Google Rankings
• iAcquire Banned From Google After Link Buying Allegations
• Google Eliminates Another Link Network, BuildMyRank.com – Just One Of Several?