Can I be a niche local partner with Newsday and get the PR8 links too?

I think it’s fair to say that as long as the target sites broke no laws, and their credit cards didn’t bounce their links were published.

I mean it’s not like ‘Mesothelioma Lawyer’ sticks out like a sore thumb…

Can I ask if you are related in some way to the site in question?

Looking at the current newsday.com homepage I’m actually surprised that they lifted the TBPR penalty. While all the sites you link to may be within their own corporate netwrok, I’d say some of the anchor text targeting is pushing boundaries. I’ve certainly seen similar sites get TBPR Penalties for less.

Rgds
Richard

If they are really bothered that a site is doing this – they could simply take the external PR juice from that site but not touch the actual PR of the site – which it has earned ( and of course send a warning to the site)

Perhaps their logic is buy decreasing the PR – buyers will be less likely to pay the high prices these PR8 links must cost.

But one has to ask – what if an Advertiser was on the front page with a link to its Website?
Isn’t that fundamentally the same thing?

Also a site like NewsDay will probably examine the links to verify that they are quality links to quality Websites – this in a sense Validates that link’s relevancy and the related Website in the same way that a Yahoo or Dmoz Editor validates their submissions.

In a real-world sense, one could argue that any company wishing to spend big bucks on a link listing in a top newspaper is more tech savvy and more ambitious about getting customers than a company that buys an obscure classified ad or small listing. This could potentially be good news to some prospects.

Finally, while there is a strong focus on Google, it must be remembered that Yahoo, MSN and Ask are also spidering those links and possibly increasing their rankings. Although they do not bring in as much traffic as Google, collectively they have good potential and should not be ignored. So even if Google penalized a site – buying links could still help on the others and could be a selling point to a site refusing to cave in to Google’s retaliatory tactics.

Mostly political but watch Trends and everyone will know the outcome of this. It’s a good test.

I’m just happy that everyone in NY is happy. ;-)

Brent

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=www.newsday.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

I imagine newsday also only received an optical penalty.

@Brent – while stats are proprietary, any reason why you cant say if you feel the penalty affected your traffic? You can safely say if it did without giving competitors any info on your site’s traffic.

Rgds
Richard

The penalty was put in place in 2007 the offending code was removed in 2007 also. I started in February 2008 and immediately filed a reinclusion request, called Google to explain the situation, but it still took until now to get the penalty removed . . . I think that is more than a slap on the wrist.

The people that are responsible for the offending code are no longer with Tribune and I have made it very clear that this can not and will not happen again.

Brent

They should be upfront and professional about their links and how it will effect the owner linking to them.

But with a page rank of 8 its not really a big blow to be knocked down to pr 5 and get the rank right back as quickly as they did.

Obviously the big G didn’t care that much, it
was more of a slap of the wrist like a child
gets a polite slap on the wrist for trying to
take the candy from the shelve more than
once then they get it..

David
http://runyourcaronwaterguide.wordpress.com/

Brent