Check:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&gl=us&q=higher+pagerank+&btnG=Search

Higher Site Rank?
Text Links Increases Site Traffic
- Fast. 1000s of Links From $10/m
www.TextLinksAds.com

Increase PR Page Rank $2
Get a quality text link from $2
SEO friendly Bidding Directory
www.DollarLinking.ca

Also notable, is that Google is no longer making money on text-link-ads ranking penalty.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&gl=us&q=text+link+ads&btnG=Search

Ionut Alex. Chitu, thanks for mentioning that query. We have disabled "buy PageRank"-type ads for a ton of queries, but if folks see queries that we missed, just note them in this thread. I believe that we'll disable ads for another set of queries late this coming week, so I'll keep an eye on the comments for additional queries where we should disable those "buy PageRank"-type ads. Thanks again.

Just please don't get too carried away, banning them on the left side of SERPs too. Please. It's much more important to us than you might think.

Another query that has ads that should probably be removed.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=increase+pagerank&btnG=Search

Increase Your Page Rank
Paying Monthly for Links is DUMB!
LIFETIME PR Links Here for ONE Fee.
www.iSellPageRank.com

Increase page rank
Boost your page rank. 700+ links
for just $24.95/mo.
www.OneWayTextLinks.com

----------------------------------------------

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=buy+pagerank+9&btnG=Search

Buy PR9 Link
Buying Reviews for links
is the newest way to build links!
www.SponsoredReviews.com

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=buy+page+rank+9&btnG=Search

Page Rank 9 Text Links
www.LiveCustomer.com Buy Links On Page Rank 9 Websites. Increase Traffic & Sales!

----------------------------------------------

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pagerank+9&btnG=Search

Pagerank 9
Buy Links On Pagerank 9 Websites.
Boost Traffic & Sales!
www.LiveCustomer.com

----------------------------------------------

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=boost+pagerank&btnG=Search

Higher Site Rank?
Text Links Increases Site Traffic
- Fast. 1000s of Links From $10/m
www.TextLinksAds.com

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Pagerank+checker&btnG=Search

Higher Site Rank?
Text Links Increases Site Traffic
- Fast. 1000s of Links From $10/m
www.TextLinksAds.com

----------------------------------------------

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=purchase+Pagerank&btnG=Search

Page Rank Checker
Buying Reviews for links
is the newest way to build links!
www.SponsoredReviews.com

----------------------------------------------

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=steal+PR9&btnG=Search

Buy PR9 Text Links
Get Text Links On PR9 Websites.
Quality Links To Increase Traffic.
www.LiveCustomer.com/PR

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=PR9+links&btnG=Search

Page Rank Checker
Buying Reviews for links
is the newest way to build links!
www.SponsoredReviews.com

These 2 appeared above the Search Results:

Buy PR9 Text Links
www.LiveCustomer.com/PR Get Text Links On PR9 Websites. Quality Links To Increase Traffic.

1000s of Links From $10/m
www.TextLinksAds.com Increases Site Traffic & Popularity – Fast. Get $100 of Free Links!

Cool, thanks for these. Just the query is enough--you don't have to paste the ad in.

Matt, it's a great move from Webspam and Ads teams. It comes a bit late, to be honest, but still it's great that Google is willing to lose some of the income in exchange for doing the right thing. It looked a bit strange to fight text links in organic search and let them still populate the ads, which has been discussed many times on this site.

It it quite obvious that black hat SEOs will try to find other ways around the new limitations, but doing nothing to prevent spam would be so much worse.

Marcin Sochacki (Wanted), I'll admit that the buying ads issue wasn't on my radar until SES San Jose in August. The AdWords policy folks have been really responsive though, and I'm glad that we're doing this.

Maybe now would be a good time to ask why the nofollow tag is being used for this?

I thought, and please correct me if I am wrong, the nofollow tag was to be used to prevent comment spam. It's now being used to help Google do their job.

Doesn't that strike anyone as odd?

Hi John Public, the main thing is that such paid links shouldn't pass PageRank. Any mechanism that accomplishes that would be within our guidelines. Nofollow is one easy way to do it, but if for some reason you're not a fan of nofollow, any other way works as well, e.g. doing a redirect through a page that is robot.txt'ed out.

What I wonder is this, if someone run a site for about a dozen years, with high quality content and sells 2 small textlinks on the homepage (to legitimate sites and help for a dedicated server), why is Google punishing that site with a halved PR? The site is running AdSense too but with the low US$ rate it just isn't enough to pay for everything. I understand that Google wants to do something about linkfarms, malware sites, etc., but this is hurting honest people too.

Mike, my short answer is that those two link buyers are trying to rank higher in a niche. If you were competing against those two link buyers, it wouldn't feel fair. You'd feel like those sites were just buying their way to better search engine rankings. I think that's why every major search engine is against the practice.

Matt, I suppose you're right. Would you happen to know what Google's policy is regarding re-instating the previous PR if the offending links are (permanently) removed?

Sure Mike, the site can absolutely get its PR reinstated if the offending links are well and truly gone (or not flowing PageRank anymore). I would ask the site name in order to check on it for you, but I don't know Philipp's policy on listing specific sites.

Philipp, looks like you've got a spam comment here by the way..

Cheers Matt, much appreciated.

(What's the site? :)

Matt,

You might consider a follow-up related post on how Google is handling mainstream media properties that do "sponsored links" that are clearly keyword rich and (I assume) bought/sold for the main purpose of Google Juice. Look at basically any newspaper/TV website for examples.

I read how some of these got hammered in the last Page Rank Update ... but I think this would be a great topic to put out on the (public) table.

I can also see it being very controversial as it pits "old-media" versus "new-media" and threatens an emerging revenue stream as traditional advertising/circulation (especially for print) is dropping.

alek

P.S. WRT Christina's "spam" comment: She probably just got excited from seeing all that green in your Blogoscoped ToolBar ... ;-)

alek, my short answer would be that those sites are no different than any other sites. If (say) a radio website is selling links that pass PageRank, Google can lose trust in that website and often that will be reflected in the Google Toolbar display.

The site is run by a friend of mine: pantheon.org

Matt: At Google you have a way of recognizing which sites sell links without a proper robots.txt or nofollow tag, wouldn't it be possible to run this check against each target-url in adsense? I think they will always find new keywords to advertise and you will always be some days or weeks behind all the time with this manual approach.

Ah, yes. Prelit Christmas trees are a bit off-topic for a folklore site. If that site wanted to remove the paid links and apply for reconsideration, I'd guess that it can regain it's PageRank.

One note of caution though: I believe I still see a listing for that site on a link broker site, e.g.

"This website offers a wealth of information and resources for mythology, folklore and religion.

Text Link Ad Location: : Home Page
Placement – Duration
Option Our Price Buy
1 Month Placement $100.00"

Stephan Locher, I'm checking into per-advertiser changes in addition to per-query changes. But I believe that tackling the most common "buy PageRank"-type queries is already a big step forward.

Why not go after the buyers of paid links and remove the incentive by punishing them with negative PR for links identified as paid instead of the sellers, which is an uphill battle that is very hard to win? Paid link markets will go underground, people will come up with new tricks, instead of buying AdWords for PR8 they will agree on euphemisms. It's a lot like RIAA and the arms race around DRM.

Hi, is this new algorithm really check when someone sells links on forums or auctions?

yes ewa

(Feel free to link to any site. You can leave out the http: // part as that prevents it from auto-linking. If you include it, one of the forum editors may remove the http part, depending on the link. The Google Blogoscoped forum as some of you know has a "fade out nofollow" policy meaning everything we don't remove will become a full valid link after a while.)

[moved from new thread "Google has Just Altered ADWORDS" -Philipp]

Notice the subtle change in Adwords as of today.

This would be absolutely amazing if this change was a result of this post yesterday – it probably is judging by past history
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/selling-links-that-pass-pagerank/#comment-117690

Matt:

What about this huge sites selling links ? :

PR6 – PR7 – PR8
elperiodico.com
www.sport.es
primeralinea.es
revistaplaystation.com

And 20 more of the same property (grupozeta.es)

They are selling one link 2500$ / month

Juan, I'm always happy to get feedback to check out. The paid link report form at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?hl=en would be the best place for future reports though.

Ilya, we take a pretty broad approach to detect both selling and buying. In some ways, they are different sides on the same coin. If you know a large number of link buyers, that can help detect new link sellers for example, and vice versa.

this is just getting silly.

if a site is getting , for arguments sake, 500,000 hits per day – why NOT sell links from it?

its a hot property that i might want to buy a link from.

Matt, when will you be starting with other languages? ;)

http://www.google.es/search?source=ig&hl=es&rlz=&q=comprar+enlaces

If you do not mind to reply (if you do simply ignore it), let's say I have a widgets site, and I place links to my new red widgets website because:

a) it sends my visits
b) I know Google loves links

Should I nofollow them, is this against the guidelines?

mister scruff, The issue isn't selling links for the purpose of getting people to view those sites. The issue is selling links that also pass on Page Rank.

Matt, when is Google going to allow pages in the Supplemental Results Index rank fairly against pages in the Main Web Index which are less relevant?

When is Google going to stop requiring that people get PageRank for their Web sites just to be included in the Main Web Index so that their content has a chance to rank against other less relevant content?

When is going to operate by the same standards it is demanding of companies that were selling links before Google existed and REINSTATE DISCLOSURE ABOUT WHICH PAGES ARE IN THE SUPPLEMENTAL RESULTS INDEX?

When is Google going to stop incentivizing the purchase of PageRank by forcing people to chase it?

When is Google going to focus on improving the quality of its search results by emphasizing relevance rather than by inappropriately and misleadingly telling people that the problem is the undisclosed buying and selling of links (a practice that, as I have noted here and elsewhere, predates Google's existence and dedication to PageRank)?

When is Google going to do the right thing and stop its unethical PR campaign?

> When is Google going to stop incentivizing
> the purchase of PageRank by forcing people to chase it?

I wonder if perhaps Google discloses the PageRank on the official toolbar so that penalties won't go by unnoticed... i.e. that people get to know when they've done something that is against the Google webmaster guidelines, so that these people can then ponder changing their pages, thereby helping Google to improve ranking quality (and ranking quality in turn helps Google make money of course). Personally, as webmaster (and when reporting on stuff, too) I like to get the information about PR. You also mention how you like disclosures, e.g. how you would like to see disclosures of supplemental indexed pages again...

This is where it confuses me in a gray area. If a site has content and mentions other companies where it has hand selected links, but it also takes payments for new or expanded listings, should every single link on the site be nofollow for fear of confusion between real old time links and paid links?

So some links are free and others are one time payment instigated and go through editorial. But all are on topic and in the niche. I just want to provide a great site and not get penalized because I take money to speed things up and get another company featured. Nothing I have read clarifies this for me when things are blended.

"When is going to operate by the same standards it is demanding of companies that were selling links before Google existed and REINSTATE DISCLOSURE ABOUT WHICH PAGES ARE IN THE SUPPLEMENTAL RESULTS INDEX?"

Michael Martinez, at SES San Jose, Danny Sullivan asked all the major search engines, and they all had the equivalent of a supplemental index, without marking their supplemental results. I honestly think that users don't notice/care about the disclosure.

I have a blog post in me about exactly this topic using the example of seen-but-uncrawled urls and drawing an analogy between those urls and the supplemental index. But I'm tired and I have to pack for PubCon tomorrow, so you'll have to chat with me in person or wait.

I think it is the right way Google is walking at the moment

I think Google is right too. It's very boring to see this kind of stuff and probably to monitor it too.

Matt Cutts, Are you still wanting more Queries that pull up questionable pagrank selling services?

Sure, Colin. Thanks for asking.

A couple more queries for you then. :)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=TDW&q=pay+for+pagerank&btnG=Search

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=VEW&q=sell+your+pagerank&btnG=Search

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=dEW&q=purchase+more+pagerank&btnG=Search

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=muq&q=cheap+pagerank&btnG=Search

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=ovq&q=high+pr+link&btnG=Search

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=cdB&q=PR9+sales&btnG=Search

The interesting part is some of these queries generated unfavorable ads that you want removed and rerunning the query a few times would sometimes bring up no ads and at other times they would bring up several ads. Am I just hitting a different Data Center when no ads are being displayed for the exact same query?