TLA has been penalized heavily by Google and does not even rank for their own name! I wrote a short article on it here, after I found out and can definitely say I'm not shocked. When will Google's rampage on the industry end? It's quest for 'relevancy' is hypocritical at best (they still prefer yahoo's paid listings), and have already de-indexed authority directories such as uncoverthenet
But, Google hasn't removed www.livecustomer.com from the index, and they were blatantly selling PR. They've changed the site so that PR isn't mentioned expect for as one aspect of the link you purchase. Their home page even has an "article" about how text link ads can "drive traffic and increase revenue". Until TLA was banned, Live Customer was pushing the PR of the sites, and bragging about the Pagerank that would be sent to your site when you purchase a link. I think Google made an example out of TLA.
Indeed it is nothing new actually. I think this happened in the period when John Chow got penalized as well. But this didn't stopped TLA to continue with their business.
The thing is you get a bunch of other link brokers in the SERPs whenever you search for 'text link ads' anyway... so what's the difference?
That is exactly what I was thinking!! There are too many for them to stop, but I guess they have to start somewhere
sorry even i missed on this new. Thanks for sharing! didnt we all know what would have eventually happened to PR buy/sell agencies? Funny thing: Go to google and seach for 'text link ads' You will see no.1 Adwords results for their website lol. If not SERPs, they are working hard to get on top of adwords! lol
Text link ads is in a unique position of buying a ton of advertising with the anchor text "Text link ads". This is semantically not a normal company name and could be confused with generic words, so it could be triggering a natural filter in the search engine spiders, similar to the excessive backlinks johnchow.com has for "make money online". I see many TLA company ads are now nofollowed, probably upon their request. I don't think this is a manual penalty.
well text-Link-Ads site is still indexed on Google but they are definately manually removed from the SERPS positions. Try searching for very specific keywords such as "text-link-ads". I imagine atleast this would show text-link-ads.com in Number 1 oh forget it atleast top 10? No where to be found!
I still see them here http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=www.Text-Link-Ads.com with PR 7 at my end,probably changes didnt propogated thru all DCs.
dont be too quick to bad mouth google, afterall if it was not for google the majority of us would have 0 traffick...
Right, because if there was no Google, people would turn off their computers and go outside to play. They wouldn't use Yahoo or MSN to search....