Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land posted about Google penalizing sites for selling PageRank. Selling PageRank is when a webmaster decides to place links on their site for a fee for the sole purpose of passing PageRank value to that site from their own. Google wants to discourage this behaviour because they use PageRank to determine the true popularity of a website. Just because you can buy links does not mean your the most popular or relevant site for your content that’s out there. So for some time now Google has been discouraging the practice but only recently have they really begun cracking down on the problem.
They are currently hand editing the PageRank value of some sites deemed to be selling PageRank. Hand editing is a desperation move and cannot end up with a good result. You’re best to play it safe and not accept money for links. Rather create a good “resources” page that not only hosts content but also links out to websites you feel are worthy of being linked to!
