Advertising, or selling links? It’s fine a fine line but when crossed can have some serious repercussions. Google position is that they don’t like it when you sell links only for PageRank. Instead sell banners and text ads that draw traffic to your site – if they pass a little PageRank, that’s OK!

So what happened to Newsday? Well, Google caught them selling links and penalized them for it. Perhaps overtime they’ll recover as most sites which receive a penalty do.

If you’re going to sell links from your site then you have to do it through back room. Don’t announce it on your site, don’t send the requests via email. Telephones are the only way to go in this regard.

Our opinion? Don’t buy or sell links for PageRank. Most business rely too heavily on Google for the traffic and it simply is not worth the risk.