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MATT CUTTS: Today's question comes from New York City.
And 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's
selling links, we say, OK, this is a link seller.
Its PageRank goes down by 30%, 40%, 50%, as a visible
indicator that we've lost trust in that domain.
And it typically also loses ability to send
PageRank 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're benefiting
get a little bit of PageRank 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 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.