Search Engine News :: Optimise Web Sites for Organic Search: Is It Appropriate for a Site to Monetize its Page Rank as Well as its Page Impressions?

Friday, August 26, 2005

Is It Appropriate for a Site to Monetize its Page Rank as Well as its Page Impressions?

Is It Appropriate for a Site to Monetize its Page Rank as Well as its Page Impressions?: "Matt Cutts, a leading software engineer at Google who often represents them on issues of spam, chimes in on this debate with the following comment:

As others have noted, if you're going to sell text links that pass reputation/PageRank, the way to do it is to add rel=nofollow to those links...

Google's view on this is quite close to Phil Ringnalda's. Selling links muddies the quality of the web and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results. The rel=nofollow attribute is the correct answer: any site can sell links, but a search engine will be able to tell that the source site is not vouching for the destination page.

Wow! It will be very interesting to see where this all goes. In my opinion, Google created this beast and now they are trying to tame it. Internet marketers who either buy or sell links will definitely want to keep their eye on this issue and what policies end up being formed as a result of it."