Google’s message: Pay for links, risk PageRank.

A clear message from Google: Don’t pay for links. The value is in the context of each site, the anchor text and other such values. Don’t buy links based on PageRank, and don’t sell links based on PageRank.

Google confirms that websites that sell links have been heavily penalized. Google’s recent page rank update had diminishing results on some very high profile websites. Some (The Stanford Daily and Statcounter) claimed to have dropped pagerank as much as four places - PR10 to PR6.

In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end

up being dropped completely from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking at all. Sites that link to or link within these sites can also be affected.

Google is a powerful player within the Internet; a drop in Google pagerank can lead to advertisers pulling out of sites, link deals being broken, decrease in site ranking and, of course, a reduction in website traffic.

Don’t pay for links. The value is in the context of each site, the anchor text and other such values. Don’t buy links based on PageRank, and don’t sell links based on PageRank. It doesn't matter if the links are one-way, reciprocal or three-way. It's important that you get the links and that the information is relevant.

Google gives you credit for a link from any page, however, links on relevant content pages (as opposed to link-farm pages) carry more weight, the key factor here is ‘relevant content pages’. One such way of achieving this is with the free whynotad wiki portal.

The whynotad wiki-style portal uses Web 2.0 programming, and, as a result, gives the information a more relevant, and hence, a much higher result when people search for the information on search engines like Google and Yahoo. In simple terms, the site gives the search engines the content feed and back links it needs to place the information at higher search relevance.

The site gives users the controls back and, therefore, you control the relevance of particular and critical content. Take, for example, a dentist who placed an ad on the site about mouthwash titled “a-z of mouthwash.” If your information is about mouthwash, the site gives you the tools to enter titles, categories, content and back links, which is then fed to the search engines. When someone searches on popular search engines like google for “a-z of mouthwash,” its relevance is much higher. Currently this ad information is ranked number 1 on Google.

Don't be afraid of reciprocation. If someone links to you out of kindness, feel free to link back to them out of gratitude. It's not going to hurt you one bit and the link to you won't be devalued. Just be sure you're adding value, not reciprocating for the sake of reciprocating.
Inbound links are the key to high rankings on Google, Yahoo and other important search engines.

News Wired - San Diego Ca.