John Scott over at V7N has pointed out that text-link-ads.com is no longer ranking on Google for "text link ads" which they historically ranked well for. On top of this, even large snippets of text from the site don’t return the page as a result.
Given the site still holds a TB PR (for the time being) and returns results using the site: command, this would suggest that they have been hit with a -30 / -900 / -whatever penalty which effectively means zero Google traffic.
4 Comments
Given the site still holds a TB PR (for the time being) and returns results using the site: command, this would suggest that they have been hit with a -30 / -900 / -whatever penalty which effectively means zero Google traffic.
4 Comments
Comments
If true, who is shocked by this?
I guess I’m not surprised it doesn’t happen to more...
Sites get penalised all the time, but I think this is quite an interesting move as other penalties I’ve seen like this are down to relatively naughty on page stuff (not bad enough to warrant a ban, but still a little too bad to justify rankings), but this is probably down to link buys which is significantly more difficult for webmasters to fix (OK, rented links can expire, but permanent paid links could be a pain to have removed). TBH I haven’t looked into it in detail so it could just be some on page thing that is causing the penalty and nowt to do with paid links, but if it is the links then it is quite a significant shot across the bow of the link buying industry.
If there’s a penalty, it’s probably for the selling of links, not the purchasing of them. Also, they come up for their actual domain, which, to me, looks like a penalty implemented by hand. It begs the question, however, why didn’t the other brokers get hit? Yes, TLA is probably the largest, but they’re far from the only players in the space.