Google Penalizes Text Link Ads

Google is cracking down on link selling by going after the biggest text link broker, Text Link Ads.

Do a search for ‘text link ads’ in Google and the Text Link Ads web site shows up 43rd. There is no other explanation for a web site with a PR7 not showing up for a search on it’s own name than Google is penalizing it.

This raises a few questions

Was Text Link Ads penalized because they are a text link broker? YES

Should other text link brokers expect the same fate? PROBABLY

Is Google going to take a more noticeable tougher stance on text link buying from here on out? PROBABLY

Hypocrisy?

Even though Google doesn’t like link buying and selling for the purpose of manipulating it’s search results, it has no problem selling Adwords on keyword searches relating to link buying and selling.

In fact, Text Link Ads is usually in the top sponsored spot for most searches related to link buying and selling. If Google doesn’t like the practice of buying and selling links, they shouldn’t sell Adwords for related keyword searches. Especially to text link brokers.

Instead of buying links through text link brokers like Text Link Ads, Google recommends buying a link in the Yahoo! directory. So link buying is okay, if you buy them from the web sites Google suggests?

Conclusion

Google penalizing Text Link Ads is probably more about sending a message than anything else.

I imagine that most of the traffic to Text Link Ads comes through links from other web sites, so being penalized by Google probably won’t affect them as much as it would a lesser know broker.

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This is actually pretty scary.

You think of Google as the “search” mogul for the internet. You would hope that they would try to bring you the most relevant information to your search or this may have been one of their initial motive when starting Google. Or at least what the user is lead to believe.

Even though searches contain text link ads around them. To think that the actual search is being filtered in kind of scary. Your search will be modified to what Google wants you find, and not really what your looking for.

I guess I cant say I’m surprised. This practice has been going on for centuries in the media but now to find it cropping up in the business practices of Google I guess I’m just a little disappointed. I’ve always thought so highly of them as a company and still do. I just hope this doesn’t become a trend.

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Rightly said by Ian, you’ll find the results at Goolge what Google wants to show you! Besides that, google is penalizing all the sites buying links as google is against paid links. Some authority directories even faced this penalty!

Step 1 is to please search engines, the contents must be SEO friendly, i.e. with keywords rich text links in appropriate places. It’s not just unique contents, but contents which are SEO friendly and can be ranked high in search engines. There is no use to have thousands of pages of contents but can’t be found in search engines

Step 2 is to provide valuable contents via these SEO friendly pages. Getting high rankings in search engines can bring you some traffic. But the ones who click the buy-now buttons are humans. Without valuable contents and irresistible offers, there would hardly be conversion.

So both SEO and valuable contents are important

Google is King. Google does what Google wants to do. This seems to be the way with companies that get BIG.

[...] are always trying to trade links. Well why not sell a spot? There are people who say that Google is now penalizing blogs with “link farms” also known as selling [...]