The SEO community’s buzzing over official word from Google that selling text links can hurt your PR and rankings. It’s truly sad that $600-a-share Google is willing to ruin its own search results because they can’t figure out how to differentiate paid ads from useful links. They’re not always different things, either, one of many reasons why penalizing a site for carrying a text link is just wrong.

The search giant’s argument is that too many people are buying links on websites in order to artificially boost their PageRank, a factor in determining search result ranking.

If you don’t know why buying links affects Google, read Chris Beasley’s Search Engine Optimization Guide. It’s truly the best SEO resource on the web. All of the facts, none of the myths, based on tried and tested experience.

A poor quality site could potentially rank higher in search results than higher quality sites by buying many links from high-PageRank sites. When Google’s search results don’t bring you the best sites first, they’re less useful to searchers, and those searchers are more likely to consider alternative search engines like Live, Yahoo! or Ask. I recommend you try them all yourself anyway, as they’ve all been working extremely hard over the past year to compete. Especially Live and Yahoo! have made huge leaps forward. Their indexes are fresher, their algorithms smarter, and their presentation often gets you what you want faster than Google’s bland result pages.

To get back on topic, Google needs to know the difference between a site linking out because it found the destination site useful to its visitors — an editorial vote for the site as PageRank is based on — versus a purchased link there because an advertiser paid for it. They’ve tried to do so algorithmically, and they’re pretty good at it. A link among a cluster at the top or bottom of a page, or near text like “sponsors” is worth less than one occurring amidst a paragraph of text in an article. That’s great. That’s what they’re paying all those Ph.D.’s to do — make Google smart enough to rank the web no matter what any site tries to do to manipulate the rankings.

But somehow they feel they’re not identifying enough this way, and took it further, much further. Official word now is that if Google knows you’re selling text advertisements and that the buyers are purchasing them in order to benefit from your PageRank, that Google will penalize the seller’s site. Not penalize the links, but penalize the entire website selling them. If it’s a high-PageRank site, they’ll knock down your PR. If it’s not, they’ll directly hurt your search result rankings. Either way the effect is to make your site appear less, if at all, in search results, reducing your traffic from Google. Perhaps if you stop selling ads and swear off the practice, you’ll get the penalties removed.

This is where a whole bunch of people cheer “it’s about time!”. This is good for Google users, right? It’s their search engine, they can dictate the rules however they like, and something that hurts those manipulating results by buying links is a good thing. But I wholeheartedly disagree.

The premise that this improves the search results isn’t entirely true. Sites selling text links aren’t somehow less useful because they support themselves on that type of advertising. They’re not somehow a less perfect match to what a Google searcher typed into the search box. They’re not somehow less worthy of the votes they got from other sites that gave them their result positions in the first place.

If at issue were only off-topic, clearly useless links that have no value to users of the linking site, I wouldn’t have a problem with this. It’d still be a further reaching “rule” than I’d like, but I could accept that Google wants to devalue sites that are devaluing themselves by mucking up their content with off-topic links. Those are less useful sites and deserve lower rankings. But this is about all link advertising. If a site only accepts advertisers whose sites complement their own, sites they wouldn’t be ashamed to vouch for anyway, then there’s no reason to penalize that seller.

The amazingly informative and useful web we have today, which contains so much more in quantity and quality than the web of a decade ago, exists largely because there is money to be made here. Commerce makes the internet go ’round just like the rest of the world. Content producers and service providers create these websites because there’s a potential to make money. And text advertising, even when advertisers specifically want text links without “nofollow” attributes, support tens of thousands of these sites.

Google’s success is built on the back of the high quality of the websites it indexes. If doing a Google search didn’t bring you to a website with what you desired, there would be no reason to search. These ad-supported websites are why Google has a market cap of $190 billion. By penalizing sites for selling text advertising, Google is damaging their own search results. They’re removing good results from the list instead of the bad ones — the buyers that ranked artificially high. This is wholly unlike anything Google’s ever done.

Let’s not forget that Google is the largest seller of text link advertising in the world themselves. Buying text ads from Google is perfectly alright, but anyone else selling them without the “ignore me please Google flag” attached to each link is someone not worth indexing. It’s almost monopolistic to control so much of the advertising landscape, so much of the search traffic, and to use bullying like this with their search dominance to discourage advertising outside of their own service.

I think what Google has said they’re doing is wrong. It’s wrong to penalize good sites that make money selling on-topic text ads that happen to not be Google AdSense ads. It’s wrong to screw up their own search results to make that happen. It’s wrong to apply the penalties manually, by people making judgement calls on a tiny subset of the web. The only thing that would make me less disgusted with Google on this issue is if they were to backpedal and explain they are only concerned with the sites that sell completely off-topic links that have no value to users and only serve to manipulate search results.