Google have had its honey moon with webmasters until recently when the happy marriage comes to an abrupt end. Let me explain.

To many webmasters Google been synonymous for traffic generator or money making search engine. One common way of making money was exploiting one of the techniques Google used to rank sites known as backlinks. Few factors of backlinks that affect Google Page Rank are:

- Number of backlinks

- Rank of the site which is doing the link

If a website was able to buy few links from high PR sites, that would expect to get a better PR.

To take advantage of this technique webmasters started buying links from different sources. Lots of web directories popped up on the internet. Many of them was able to achieve high ranks in different ways (black hat or white hat either). This became a huge business to thousands of webmasters for a long time. Those links are sold for $10-$300.

Until recently there is rumor that Google started demoting all the sites that sell links as well as sites that buy links. Although this allegation is not all together true, some sites actually got demoted some sites still holds high PR. If you look all the sites selling text link ads e.g. Text-Link-Ads.com, AdBrite.com they still hold high PR. If you look at the webmaster forums you will find lot of rants and raves about Google. Why? Most of the directory owners lost major chunk of their business because of this rumor. People are not buying directory listing as did before.