Text-Link-Ads Penalized and De-indexed By Google
September 5, 2007
Shocking? Not Quite…
Text-Link-Ads has officially lost all its SERP rankings in Google. They don’t even rank for their own name anymore - in fact the actual site is not on the first page, nor the second, thirth, fourth or even the seventh! Go ahead and see for yourself
Google has been warning of its crack down on the paid links industry for the last little while, and the penalty on Text Link Ads does not come as a surprise given the recent de-indexing such as UndertheCover.Net.
The big ‘G’ is taking its toll on the industry, and dozens of hardworking webmasters are going out of business. As you can probably imagine, there is little value in backlinks when your primary method of getting traffic is through Google’s organic search results.
This is a serious blow to MediaWhiz holdings, which recently acquired Text-Link-Ads and I am certain that this incident is not the last of Google’s rampage on overturning the industry amidst concerns regarding the next PR update, stance on paid links, and paid directory submissions.
edit: Looks like this this incident happened a while ago, I must have been living under a rock! Go figure…
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A Toronto Based Serial Entrepreneur and Internet Marketer
September 5th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
yeh this has happened a while ago. it’s interesting to see what google plans on doing now that this is against their TOS. great post bud.
September 5th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
I found them on the 5th page, wow I guess this is a warning to others in this type of business and to those buying text links, hmmm curiously Google still show text-link-ads.com adwords, I guess its okay to penalise them and take their money.
September 5th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
I’m sure they will not calculate inbound paid link page rank in page rank update in the future.
So no more paid link industry…. But good for competitors of Text-Link-Ads . It is very unfair if this happened to only one site…
September 6th, 2007 at 12:24 am
I still see them at the first page on TOP :O in sponsored links
September 6th, 2007 at 12:46 am
Hey Dj Flush - Sponsored Links are paid listings by Google. As long as you can pay a high enough cost-per-click for the listing it will be up even if your site isn’t indexed by google at all!
September 10th, 2007 at 9:45 am
either google is crazy with its policies and principles or TLA did an obvious mistake. its hard to now understand whether google will allow anyone to live in peace at all. for sure for TLA its a severe blow !
October 8th, 2007 at 11:54 am
[...] While Text Link ads own story is here. [...]
October 9th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
[...] these links, or not have paid links at all. As for enforcing these rules, Google has recently begun punishing sites by manually reducing the PageRank for sites involved in the buying and selling of links, most [...]
October 11th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
As someone who has focused more on organic results with my SEO I like to see Google penalizing sites and I think it levels the playing field more.
October 15th, 2007 at 4:51 am
I personally think it is right for Google to penalise sites involved in SERPs manipulation. As for Text Link Ads, they advertise themselves as being able to drive traffic as well as improve your rankings, so there you go - honest webmasters working hard to get organic traffic can now be relieved
October 15th, 2007 at 6:43 am
[...] Daily Moolah [...]
October 24th, 2007 at 6:50 am
“so there you go - honest webmasters working hard to get organic traffic can now be relieved
”
Yeah, but how you can tell the difference between paid and natural links? They look exactly the same inside the HTML code, the very code that Google scans. Unless they do some manual reviews.
October 26th, 2007 at 11:56 am
So Google can hand edit Text Link Ads out of the SERPs but claim they can’t do anything about offensive results such as ‘jew’ http://www.google.com/search?q=jew&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Just checked the results - appears they fixed that one though they’ve left their disclaimer in the sponsored results.
October 26th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
[...] a coincidence. When you look at how Text Link Ads (probably AdSense’s only real competitor) has been penalised to hell by Google, it begins to look like hypocrisy at best and a powerful Google using its might for [...]
October 29th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
what about affiliate links? most of the time affiliate links look the same like paid links. also what happen if more and more webmasters later add nofollow in their links (cause they’re afraid of being accused selling links)? nofollow will lost their meaning because search engine will still need to crawl them for result anyway.
November 2nd, 2007 at 7:32 am
Interesting that Google is so angry with TLA that they’ll delist them, but not angry enough to stop taking their money.
November 2nd, 2007 at 12:26 pm
everybody started hating text link ads these days
November 3rd, 2007 at 1:45 pm
“everybody started hating text link ads these days”
Yes everyone wants to disassociate themselves with TLA for fear of reprisal by google.
December 7th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
You say that with tongue in cheek, right Kay?
December 12th, 2007 at 5:00 am
Is this targetted only at TLA? How about other text link exchange programs? Will these be affected too?
December 12th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Ok, here’s a question.
If you are a TLA publisher, how does Google know if you are using TLA? I mean the links are dynamically generated using php on the back end and if you look at the source code the links are plain links.
There are no indicators of text link ads in the style sheet or anything like that.
Maybe G is looking for the xml file that you store locally?
April 1st, 2008 at 5:42 pm
[...] Problém je, že Google prosazuje sv?j systém PPC reklamy a chce zni?it systém placených odkaz? a takové stránky si Google individuáln? vybírá a zhorší PR t?eba z 9 na 5, anglicky mluvící ?tená?e si mohou p?e?íst ?lánek o tom jak http://www.text-link-ads.com byl penalizován. [...]
May 11th, 2008 at 1:21 am
Well, a google search of ‘text link ads’ has them as #1 on google again… at least it does today.
June 4th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Now they say that Google will start to penalize even the sites that are inside Text-lin-ads.com and similar sites.( Payperpost, ReviewMe etc.)