Seroundtable.com : A respected source for Search engine related news with a news blog and a forum which gets high traffic is still one of those sites which sells text link ads and is not yet penalised by Google. Confused what is this? Lets check out some of the articles available on their own website which gives more information.
Google Declares War on Paid Links: But Why Now?
Matt Cutts Clarifies Recent PageRank Drops & Link Buying
The October 2007 Paid Link Debate
Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
Stop Selling Text Link Ads
From the above links you can easily understand that now Google is officially against buying and selling of links and there were many websites which have lost their page rank or serps if caught up. If this is the case one of the best source of this information itself is selling links on their website. Recently seroundtable.com did lose their page rank from a high page rank 7 to PR4 but still seems they have not learnt the lesson and are selling text link ads on their website which would be available on all the pages aka sitewide and are basically sold for passing page rank and helping the buyers in attaining better serps.
A website which has a <10k alexa , authority backlinks, huge traffic and running business against the search engines is something which would normally be worth discussing and i guess these guys have got some insider hands? which is the reason they are not yet penalised in the SERPS nor the advertising websites. mattcutts has already made a post on this issue – Selling links that pass PageRank which has got numerous comments, but still even after so much buzz these guys are selling text link ads.
Price : 350$ / Month : Followed Search Engine Friendly Text Link Ad
In a post @ seroundtable.com : Theory: How Does Google Determine Which Sites Sell Links? | Sphinn Discussion Barry Schwartz commented the following :
NoFollow was about, “do you trust those links.” That is why it was first created. I trust my sponsors or else I would not list them there. My sponsors trust me back. Why should I label a link not trustworthy if I trust them?
If the above case is true why not obey to the google rule and add rel=”nofollow” to the sponsor’s links? The very reason is that you guys are just looking for making extra 350$ * 26 = 9100 USD/Month and i guess thats more important to you and you are excusing yourself with the trustworthy related words. The real fact is that the moment these guys start adding rel=”nofollow” to their text link sponsors they would lose up a minimum of 75% of their advertisers and may be give them a huge loss. You can check out the left handside section of seroundtable for the current advertisers.
Do you guys think this is fair?
They are big guys.
same with johnchow too.
Well it was $450.00 some month back, I think they dropped the link prices after the pagerank update.
I think you can even influence Google guidelines, when u are BIG in the industry.
yes they are BIG ones.. the pricing fall of Seroundtable but yest i read in John Chow’s blog that the pricing of REVIEW on his blog is going to increase from $450 to $500 from 1st March. So they do not care of the SE’s i think so … 😉