Hold on to your hats boys and girls, but Goolge has done it again. Have you checked your page rank lately? How about your search engine position? .... (pause to allow time for those who opened windows and are doing the checking) ....
Yep! Time to rework and re-connect to site and for some re-think their strategy. In particular those that have paid links and advertising with certain key places and some paid link or paid content might want to review their net strategy.
"Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results. We enjoy working with webmasters, and an added benefit of our working together is that when you make better and more accessible content, the internet, as well as our index, improves. This in turn allows us to deliver more relevant search results to users.
If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines."
It goes on from there, but bottomline, Google won't stand for (at least not without being paid for it too) false advertisement (i.e. PayPerPost), or false links and link farms that might be used to ultimately boost one's position.
The unfortunate thing is that there really are 6 degrees to Kevin Bacon (or however many degrees it is) and I'm sure we all have some link on someone's site who has a link on someone else's site who... ultimately utilizes a link farm or other such tool that will be penalizing our sites as well (read below).
(from comment section) - In the Kevin Bacon reference, I was referring to your linking partner's page rank going down as a result of them using a link-bait or paid link system. Since their page rank goes down, the relevance of the links point to your site go down and therefore could push your page rank down, unbeknownst to you. You do not receive an outright penalty as one commenter pointed out.
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