As already mentioned of penalties on UK Newspapers which caused their Page Rank (Some of these even goggle to zero PR) and search engine rankings drop on large scale. Its also confirmed that Google also sending notification to these link selling sites and some of those confirmed as well.
Matt Cutts clearly stated the downfalls of selling links
“Please be wary if someone approaches you and wants to pay you for links or “advertorial” pages on your site that pass PageRank. Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action on such violations. The consequences for a linkselling site start with losing trust in Google’s search results, as well as reduction of the site’s visible PageRank in the Google Toolbar. The consequences can also include lower rankings for that site in Google’s search results.”Google further advices for those who received such email notifications in webmaster tools to remove those paid links or use rel=”nofollow” attribute. You need to submit reconsideration request after removing all the paid links. Its also possible that in an extreme case, site selling links can be fully removed from Google’s search results.
About Mohnesh Kohli
There are many famous sites which are selling links. Let us see do they get affected after this. This will be an interesting thing to look out for.
Google has been hitting the link buyers by imposing penalties from long time this is for the first time Google is going to attack link sellers. It mean you cannot earn money from your website. If you need just sell ads with nofollow tags.
Well this is change in strategy for Google. This will have adverse effect on alot of sites which are selling links and that too at high prices. Let us see how this will now effect the link market
There are too many sites which are selling paid links from long time but now the Google confirmed The Penalty for Link Sellers & also declined the News Sites For Paid Advertorials. Let us see how much it effects the famous Link Sellers for their paid links.
Will Google penalize parts of its own company for running advertorials? May not be. Read Google’s own linking policies http://www.seobook.com/google-advertorials
Clearly Google takes paid links that pass pagerank seriously, as acknowledged by their repeated use of them.