Seems Google is doing the big dance again with its pagerank. One of my blogs has seemingly gone from PR2 to PR0. And yes, I do sell links. No really I do. I have done for ages, through Text Link Ads, through my own sales, through “a certain paid blogging company”. I sell them simply because I choose NOT to add the rel=nofollow tag that Google virtually demanded everyone use because their search engine formulae weren’t upto snuff.
In reality, I don’t sell text links for PR. I sell them for traffic, for advertising, for people to check out on this blog and on others. I sell them so that advertisers pay me to cover my server costs, I sell them to earn a little extra money. If I had to rely on Adsense I’d be running ALL my blogs on Geocities instead simply because Adsense clicks have been very poor performers for me.
I also sell links for advertisers to garner traffic, and I believe selling text links is a lot less hassle than Adsense. Why? Simply, you buy them once, and you forget about them until the subscription expires or renews. You can click on them as many times as you like, you won’t experience click fraud. Really, text links are a much simpler form of advertising, and quite effective.
So, with a PR0, am I going to kowtow to Google this time? Unlikely, there will be a time when Google search engine is implicitly able to determine which links are paid and which are not, without any nofollow. I see little or no reason to change, esp. as Google also sells links that transfer pagerank. Worse, if everyone nofollowed every link on their blog, as some have done, it will make pagerank virtually useless. So, I’m not changing my ways; Google, if it wants to remain relevant simply has to figure out this issue for themselves.