Quote:
Originally Posted by John Scott
3. PR10, PR8, PR9 links - those make me nervous. It smacks of buying PageRank, and that's one way to get on Google's radar.
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Agreed, that's usually what I warn people against. Most of us have seen sites (mostly directories) get penalized for going overboard with high-
PR link-buying. I think they might be refining this type of link-buying detection though, to catch somewhat-moderate link-buyers.
If Google can detect and eliminate Googlebombs, it seems like detecting unnatural linking patterns (indicating potential link-selling) isn't too far off. With a quick manual check, they may be able to detect and discount purchased links from a site.
Howstuffworks.com recently stopped selling links, I'm actually surprised it took them so long. Thanks for the topic, I now have something to blog about =)