Today's question comes from New York City.
Sergey L asks if some site that is linking to my site gets penalized for purchasing links.
Will my site get affected by that penalty?
Well, normally, what happens is when we find a site that it's selling links, we say, okay, this is a link seller.
It's page rank goes down by 30%, 40%, 50% as a visible indicator that we've lost trust in that domain, and it typically also loses the ability to send page rank going forward.
So, for example, suppose we have a selling site that is selling links to a buying site, and the selling site also happens to link to you.
The sort of situation that might happen is we find out that that's a link seller, and as a result, we just don't trust the outgoing links from that site.
So the most likely scenario is if there is a link selling site and they get caught for selling links and they just happen to be linking to you.
The value of that link that the site was providing, it just goes away.
So it's the sort of thing where maybe you are benefiting getting a little bit of page rank from that site.
Now, since we don't trust that site, you wouldn't be getting that benefit.
So typically it's not the sort of thing where you get affected by that penalty in the sense that you won't, you get demoted or anything harsh like that.
It's just you no longer get the benefit of the link from that site because we don't trust it anymore.