On a blog post discussing why Google does not like irrelevant Sponsored Blog Posts that pass link juice, Matt Cutts left a little tidbit of information in a comment stating that the Google Spam team and the AdWords team have gotten together to ban AdWords advetisements for sites or networks that sell links for PageRank.
This does not mean that Google is banning all link selling advertisers, just the ones that openly promote that their services influence Google rankings by selling links based on Google PageRank.
Interesting enough, this morning I’m seeing no AdWords ads for search terms like “buy links” but for “link advertising” ads are still there. This could be a fluke however, since according to Matt’s post Google AdWords is working on banning the ads for PageRank oriented terms.
One difference is also that a user who searches for ‘buy links’ may have the intent to buy PageRank passing links while “link advertising’ is more of a marketing oriented term, and also geared for networks such as AdBrite and Google AdSense.
What’s even more odd is that I’m not seeing any ads for “link building” right now, which is a practiced and organic part of the SEO process.
Matt’s comment on the issue:
I recently chatted with AdWords policy folks, and the AdWords folks have disabled ads for many queries such as “pagerank 8? that would have shown ads before. I expect that we’ll probably disable ads for more “buy PageRank”-type queries as well.
There are also some other posts done by Matt & Google, especially looking at paid reviews. I’ll be covering these in an upcoming post on SEJ.
