Google penalty for paid links

It's getting late now, so to kick off this blog I thought it might be useful to let everyone know that Google are now penalising websites that sell links, and indeed websites with paid links included on their web pages. In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well.

When I say penalising, basically many websites have had their PageRank reduced over the past week or so. It seems a fairly logical step from Google, as their search engine algorithms give ranking juice to websites with relevant good quality inward links, therefore large directories and other ecommerce websites were capitalising on this with paid links. Hopefully this will mean large directories will slip down the rankings and help refine the search to produce good quality relevant results.