Most people are aware of the recent excitement in online publishing after the UK newspaper site www.Express.co.uk was caught red handed selling links to improve SEO performance in Google, a severe violation of their guidelines.
Everyone waited with baited breath for a response from Google and a this came from Matt Cutts in his interview with Digital Inspiration.
If you’re talking about the recent incident in the UK, we saw that. Google’s quality guidelines are clear on this point: paid links shouldn’t pass PageRank.
Google would take action on those violations, both so that the link buyers wouldn’t benefit and so that the link sellers wouldn’t be trusted in the future by Google.
The suggestion is that the www.express.co.uk will no longer be able to pass PageRank. This sounds pretty severe but this doesn’t mean that www.express.co.uk will lose any PageRank and so it might not affect their traffic. According to Alexa, the share of Pageviews in shows no recent decline.
www.alexa.com/siteinfo/express.co.uk
Looking in Hitwise, there appears to be no change in Google referred traffic.
Some people have reported drops in the reported PageRank value of www.express.co.uk but any decent SEO knows there is a weak correlation between PageRank and actual traffic. If the PageRank has dropped as a result of a penalty then it hasn’t affected the traffic to the site.
If the non-trusting of links doesn’t affect the traffic of the site then you would at least expect it to affect the sites that it links to.
Has it affected the site’s ability to pass Juice? Looking at the other sites owned by Express Newspapers which are heavily linked from www.express.co.uk there does not appear to be any significant changes in traffic.
www.alexa.com/siteinfo/dailystar.co.uk
www.alexa.com/siteinfo/new-magazine.co.uk
www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ok.co.uk
Of course these sites presumably have a lot of PageRank from other external sources. There is minimal variation in IP addresses of the Express sites which are all hosted in the same data centre so it’s probable that those links never passed any PageRank to begin with.
Perhaps the penalties have yet to kick in but so far it looks as if the Express Group have managed to get off scott free.