Robin Good writes the popular MasterNewMedia blog that enjoys a Google Page Rank of 7 and is also a premium Adsense Publisher. Like most other websites on the planet, this place is monetized by Google Adsense, text links and other direct advertising.
Early this week, Robin realized that his site has been pushed out of Google without warning and all the organic search traffic originating from Google suddenly vanished.
This could be the worst nightmare for any online publisher since Google has, without doubts, the maximum reach. In Robin's case, Google was responsible for 80% of his site traffic which is now gone.
Initially, he thought the corrupt sitemap file for responsible for Google kicking the site out of the top results but soon realized the culprit was something else - paid links. [Read Matt Cutts warning on paid links here and here.]
Robin has submitted a re-inclusion requested with Google. He makes over $3k per month from Text Link Ads alone but has decided to remove them from his site because it's an overall loss in the long term.
"I do not suggest you take off text links or stop considering them because they pose a risk of Google penalizing your site. I suggest this because if it doesn't start from me the being honest and transparent with the system I use to survive this independent publishing game is not going to last very long."
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/08/google-bans-pr-7-website-for-selling.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
same happened to my site but only can figure out now that only beacause of text link ads... i wanna know how to inform google that i removed tla
Written on 17/8/07 12:06 AM
I'm sure Google can devise an algorithm to ignore paid text link ads (TLA?) in calculation of a site's PageRank. Kicking off a site from their search results seems a bit harsh.
Written on 17/8/07 3:01 AM
hmm, the site seems that the site is back in the index and with PR. But logically, google should not ban the site just becasue it is selling text links, infact why it would do that? The text links are be used for marketing purpose too.. and it will be really difficult for google to know whether that text link is for marketing purpose or for PR.. so if google is smart enough then it will just not follow the links provided there.. i.e. outbound ones...
Actually in many cases, we think google banned the site for xx reason but actually there might be something else wrong too..
For example..some 3-4 months back my personal blog got banned from google, PR was there but I was out of the index totally.. I was wondering what could have been wrong and why google is acting so bad on me.. but when I digged the issue more (using google's webmaster tools) I found that due to issues with my hosting guys and due to some plugin, mysql was acting bad and blog was throwing internal server errors every now and then.. and due to too many errors in the crawl, google kicked me out of the index...
I fixed the issue, the site went into good old sandbox and quickly got back again in the index...
So the point here is, there are chances of some other issues with the site coz banning just for using TLA or keeping paid links does not make any sense to me..
just my 2 cents..
Regards,
Deep
Written on 17/8/07 3:05 PM
One service that I have heard of recently after learning about ReviewMe and PayPerPost is the site DisclosurePolicy.org. It allows blog owners to create a disclaimer that they can place on their site notifying readers if they were compensated for selling the content on sites like ReviewMe or PPP.
This gives site owners some accountability and transparency to let their readers know if what they're reading has been paid for.
I don't know whether or not this would influence Google or not, but Adwords isn't the only player on the block. There are plenty of other advertisers that I'm sure would be happy to let their ads be placed on a site with a PR of 7.
Written on 18/8/07 2:02 PM
It makes no sense that Google are banning companies that are using TLA. The fact of the matter is that they would have to remove pretty much every SEO or search site from their index if that were the case.
Written on 19/8/07 4:59 AM
This article is providing misinformation and confusing people.
There was no proof that it was TLA - it was just an assumption.
Incidently an assumption that was wrong because the site is now back in the index and Robin Good does not know what caused it - could be literally hundreds of different reasons.
Also Matt Cutts has never said that a site will be deindexed for selling links - he actually said it wouldn't be able to pass page rank. That's a huge difference.
Written on 20/8/07 4:33 PM
Amit, what you personally think? Google really can do this with anyone who offer text link ads? its only applicable for adsense sites? or non-adsense sites also?
Written on 22/8/07 10:32 PM
it seems it was back in the index with its original PR, was it really on paid links? or just someone is envy on the traffic he got on se? you know competition is tough, you have to fight not just search engine but also on the competitor that can kill your business called "sabotage"
Written on 3/9/07 2:20 PM