SFGate.com was an avid seller of text links via text-link-ads.com and still does. The "sponsored ads" could be found at the very bottom of many section pages on sfgate.com

The big question is, if Google drops PageRank of highly important new organizations like WashPost, it should imply that it will become much harder to find relevant news stories and commentary from these organizations via Google. It happens that tons of majjor US newspapers sold links via text-link-ads, Washington Times is there, Chicago Sun Times, and quite a few TV stations.

For example, if you look at the bottom of foxnews.com, you'll find an array of 10 little ads, each of them includes a text-link to the site (which would qualify as a paid link for the purposes of Google's wrath, they're live HTML links without nofollow).

I suspect that if Google drops PageRank for real (affective search results) rather than only for demonstrative purposes, it will be a bigger loss for Google than for all of the sites involved. Google will stop returning relevant news content on search queries, instead serving up rehash of the same stories form Johnny blogger who doesn't sell links yet. One of the main reasons such serious news organizations took the gamble on selling paid links in the first place, is that their brands and websites are well known and get a lot of direct traffic, Google or not.

This may be a tacit admission on Google's part that they've been unable to come up with reliable algorithms to filter out paid links without going on a manual witch-hunt after link-selling sites. What the 200 Billion company needs now, is a lot of free help from webmasters to protect its turf in selling paid ads in search results.

Not knowing a lot about the different merits of whether the change is good or bad all I want is better search results. Since Google’s whole business is dependent on having the best search engine I expect if the change doesn’t deliver on this they will change it again.

Personally, I moved from Ireland to the UK. In Ireland Google was great for finding products and services as there were very few aggregator sites. In the UK it is completely different. The search results are full of aggregators, pricing sites and link farms. None of which give me the information I need.

I look forward to the sites with real valuable content being at the top of the search pile again.

We're noticing that even if link farms are down-graded, you get blog-farms and wordpress farms instead. For "steel buildings" - someone has 25 separate domains in the top 100 all interlinking and all using wordpress to generate very similar sites knocking genuine sites out of the listing. The actual company running this is anonymous and the domains are anonymously registered so they know what they're trying to do. I guess it's harder work than a simple link-farm but when potential lost revenues are in the $100k+ mark it becomes worth spoofing the system.

I guess so far no-one has tried to sue Google for reputation damage if their page rank declines (page rank being a measure of 'quality').

Google does frown upon selling/buying links. But how it punishes these sites is usually not with a reduction in Google PageRank. Instead Google will make the offending sites passing-on-PageRank useless. Thus a paid link from one of these sites would be worth nothing to the linked site, as if the link did not exist in the first place.

A drop in PageRank more often comes from an increase in competition in their sector, with existing links being switched to other sites or a change in the PageRank algo, which would effect a larger number of sites.

It may be that Google is now forward checking the links on each page and testing their relationship to the page.

That would mean a news page about Paris Hilton with 3 reference links to other Paris stories but 10 ad links to random sites (for cars, hair colour, the latest mobile phone etc) would probably see a decline in PageRank as most of the links bear no relation to the content of the page.

Just a theory...

Albert: The answer to your worries is a Goole Custom Search Engine that you can tailor for your own peferences: http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

I for example did myself a search engine that excludes from the search results 900+ shopping and spam sites and boosts reputable company websites: http://search.ratbert.info/

Also you can customize your own refinement keywords, I used "specifications, reviews, downloads, drivers", click on one of them on the search results and it narrows down the search scope.

"The search results are full of aggregators, pricing sites and link farms. None of which give me the information I need."

Surely, google can detect that a site has no information content of its own and consists mainly of links to other sites.

Failing that, why not get searchers to identify such sites as they come across them, so that once 100 or more deduplicated searchers have identified a domain as a spamlink site, its ranking progressively diminishes?

Nice thought, but how long before botherders started selling denunciations "we can lower your competitors page rank".

If they can eliminate the spam sites it would be a major step forward. There are some searches that work in Google, but anything with a product name or a hotel name, for instance, just go to a bunch of bottom feeders looking to make a fast back.

I think metadata might be the answer - offer the option of having a site describe itself with a signed set of "honest metadata". If the metadata turns out not to be honest, then flag it up and ban the instigators. If a site creator proves themselves above board, then their metadata gets its trust quota increased.