I received yet another e-mail yesterday from Text-Link-Ads notifying me that they were not detecting any ads showing on my site and asking me to fix it. Of course, it makes sense that the ads are not being displayed since I CANCELED MY ACCOUNT IN JULY!
I know it’s probably just their faulty system blindly sending out these notices and not distinguishing between canceled and live accounts, but it’s still pretty irritating. I still occasionally get messages like this (or worse, notices saying that they’ve sold yet another ad on my site, long after I deactivated my account). I always quickly send them back an e-mail reminding them that I canceled, and also giving them a guilt trip / lecture about continuing to sell ads to their customers when they know they will not be displayed on my site.
Today I decided that maybe instead of just e-mailing them back to complain, I should post a negative story about TLA every time this happens. So, here’s today’s dose of TLA bashing, from a story on The Stanford Daily:
Last week, I noticed the Stanford Daily had dropped from a PR9 when I wrote the above in April to PR7 today. That’s a huge drop that has no apparent reason to happen. Some others were also reporting PageRank drops. So I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links.
In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well.