Google vs Paid Links The War Continues

October 9, 2007

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This is official that selling paid links can hurt your pagerank and google rankings. You can check this article In search engine land which said that many sites have been hurt about it. The Stanford Daily is a .edu university and it seems that their students was selling links for $350 per month. They were pagerank 9 and last week Google dropped their pagerank to 7.

Google says that dropping the pagerank is manually reviewed. So we can conclude here that the most well-known sites will be hitted.

As many of you already know that Johnchow a well-known blogger have been hitted as well. His pagerank was 6 and dropped to 5 (last time I checked). He also suffered from being ranked well in Google even with his name. The last time I saw Johnchow dot com ranked in Google was in page 6 with other keyword (don’t remember which one).

Google says that most people hit with a PageRank decrease will likely notice this, and then they can request a review. Eventually, it may be something flagged within the Google Webmaster Central system.

Google says that by doing this, it would be easy for anyone to detect which sites have not had their paid links discounted — and since they don’t want people to buy links, that would work against their efforts. For the same reason, Google is only decreasing the PageRank for a subset of the sites they actually know about.

David Airey is another blogger that have been affected by this issue and then he was back with its normal Google ranking. Matt Cutts talked about why David Airey has been banned and there were 2 reasons:
1. Having paid links to bad neighbourhoods

2. Trying to game my search engine rankings with black hat SEO.

A popular Black Hat SEO is when you are giving a prize and ask for linking back to your blog. This is one of the reasons that David Airey said. Also Johnchow was afffected about this because the same reasons. “I Add your link to my monthly/weekly posts if you do a review about my site with bla bla anchor texts”.

There are many steps to avoid a Google penalty and most of us already know about this:

• Don’t participate in any form of black hat SEO: Just optimize your blog/site (titles, headers,etc..) but don’t play the game about Linking. Remember the article about Top 6 reasons why link building is harder in 2007 than in 2001 ok add another top reason that you will from now on build your links naturally.

• Add the rel=”nofollow” tag to any paid links on your website: Everyone thought that this is a joke but it seems that this is a real POWERFULL tag and will recommend to start adding the nofollow tag to your blogs and websites.

• Be careful not to link to bad neighbourhoods: This is difficult to know who are the “bad” neighbourhoods. But before you link or pay any advertising form you have to check the site and see if there is a lot of links. Another good way to know if it is a good or bad neighbourhood is to check the site Google ranking, if they are banned from the domain keyword (like johnchow and David Airey) you could possible conclude that this is a bad neighbourhood

Another Good point to check out is that many people who have been affected by this issue are advertisers and publishers in TLA. This is what David said about it:

What’s interesting about those two paid links that Matt mentions, is that the one for business card printing was automatically placed in my sidebar, after I signed up for Text Link Ads (TLA)… As far as I can remember, there’s no screening process.

The TLA website, whilst having a Google Page Rank of 7/10, doesn’t appear anywhere relevant when conducting a search via Google, so they seem to have a similar penalty imposed on them.

So it mind be the end of TLA? This is just expeculations. Now building your backlinks is more difficult than 2007 (even if it is not finished yet).

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines