In a follow-up to the articles I posted earlier (first, second), it appears that Google has begun to penalize sites for selling PageRank via text links, and TLA specifically. [More detail, from the site in question...]
Also, as I feared / predicted, Google gave NO warning to the site owner before the penalization took effect, and there is no telling when (or if) the ranking will be restored.
In theory there is nothing else I can do right now. Just sit back and wait until a Google revisor sees my request, evaluates it and puts the site back in the search results.
According to what I have read in forums yesterday this can easily take several weeks if not months.
And this is where my heart crumbles. Without Google visitors, my revenues are 1/4 or less than our average monthly gross income. Without them I can’t pay my office space, editors, writers, webmaster or server space, let alone my own monthly expenses and the taxes I am due at the end of the month.
It is a tough situation.
Some may accuse Google of violating their famous “don’t be evil” position by taking this zero tolerance approach. While I agree that they should have at least given notice and the opportunity for self-correction, at the same time selling links in this manner has always been against Google’s ranking policies, and all they’re really doing is more consistently enforcing that policy.
4 Comments
if you’re gonna try to cheat pagerank, you should at least do it in a way that is harder for google to track. of course, if your google income is really that important to you (or if you’d just like to not be an immoral person), you probably shouldn’t try to cheat their system. that’s like robbing your stock broker.
Yeah, like I said in my earlier posts, I don’t think that buying/selling PageRank links is ethical in the first place, so I wouldn’t do it for that reason alone.
But, even if you disagree with (or don’t care about) the ethics side of it, it’s pretty dumb to do it anyway. Most people have web sites so that people can see them, for one reason or another (whether it’s profit related or not), and if you game Google’s system and end up getting penalized for it, the bottom line is that much fewer people will see your site.
Now, if THAT doesn’t matter to you (or if you don’t agree or don’t care that it’s unethical), then you might want to try TLA, because you might make a lot of money in the short term (much more than you can from Google Ads, for most people), until they shut you down and your site disappears from search results. Of course, you also have to be willing to live with what happens after the fact, which is that your ad revenue will disappear and it will be impossible to monetize any other way because of the Google penalty reducing the value of your site (in advertiser’s minds) to zero.
Those are strong words, so strong I’d be worried about you turning anyone in that would comment.
I’m not going to turn anyone in, because that would be a jerk thing to do. However, there is certainly no shortage of jerks out on the internets, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if some of them started some sort of anti-PageRank-selling crusade and started reporting people left and right.