Google is dropping all Keywords to those sites that have sold text links on them

Yeah I mean they have no way of knowing which ones are exchanged and which ones are paid for on my sites. I do not have a "sponsored" or "advertiser" section It is called something else which give no indication of paid links. they are not text-link ads or sold through a third party

 

Yeah I hope they do something too.. I wish the us dollar would go back up. I liked it when the Canadian dollar was worth less then the US.

I just checked and the ones that saw the drop off the map in keywords did not have adwords campaigns going. but the ones that had adwords had no changes. I will watch this as the week goes on.

If no changes in 3 days on those sites I will try adswords on one of them as see if they get put back..

 

In that case, they'd have to devalue themselves (google checkout.) Wall covered this. You can pay to have a review on the PR8 google checkout blog, and they let your link have targeted anchor text. And no-follow tags are absent. Naughty google.

 

Never heard of this please give me some live links and more info.

If someone wants to pay for advertising from me and I deem their site to have value then it should count as a backlink for the search engines. IMO google should not have the right to force me to change the code of my site (re: no follow). Their algorithm is mostly based on backlink votes, but they should not (and can't) dictate how each and every webmaster votes....except for the illegal stuff.

 

Yeah I agree totally, illegal sites and no spam sites and I think everything else should be fair game. I heard that the "big sites" ie big companies play the same way we are but are allowed to get away with it... they buy links to get to number one and so on.. It pissed me off when I heard this I will try and find the article but it was a while ago not sure if I can locate it.

 

Oh, and it's not the first time google has sold links, look at this story.

And this story.

As for the checkout thing, I can't find that story at the moment (should have bookmarked it), but when I do, I'll post it. (Of course, anyone can research that themselves too, just look at the page source of the google checkout blog). These stories should be passed around to as many people as possible.

 

Interesting stories.. thanks for posting them. I am looking for the checkout story but with no luck myself I will post it in here if I am able to find it ..

 

So, will sites like myspace geeks get penalized?

 

This would be a good explination why my site is gone from 2 of my important keywords for my site, but ive never sold any links from it. Today i checked my keywords on google webmaster tools and i went from #21 to #16 but yet when i search the keyword in google my site doesnt show up.

 

That no good for you mate. Sorry to hear that.

Update for me:

The sites in question have not had any new changes in there keywords. Still not showing up anymore.

 

Well i guess this is the best to ask...

Does anyone here have Adult or Gambling or Pharmacy sites listed
on thier sites that have been penalized in one form or another?

thx
malcolm

 

Google doesn't care if a site links to porn or not. I don't believe their algorithm ranks types of content as "good" or "bad", but if your site is completely unrelated to what you are linking to, then you will go down in the ranks.

 

How can you be so sure?

You Mean with all that talk and examples "matt" showed on his blog with Gambling, Adult, Pharmacy sites
might not have some weight on who you are linking too?

Ive recently seen that mikey posted this Site whom was affected like many others and
noticed that many affected sites do in fact "link" or offer "categories" for these Possibly Bad Neighborhood sites
and thier could very well be a connection to this ... scandal or whatever



thx
malcolm

 

IMVHO google is hurting themselves. Selling links and whatever is how we drive traffic.....I mean their job is selling ads, and they are going to drop sites that can sell an ad? Does no one else see a problem with that?

I'll admit they are the best search engine, and they sure know how to make money, but their standards at times are all over the place. I have a site thats good enough to sell ads, but that makes it not worthy of being listed? Is that not completely backwards?

i guess to some degree I have to do the google dance, but I only will for so long. The market is ripe for another ebay, google and paypal. yeah i know its like, well near impossible, but no one here likely has not been hurt by all three for doing nothing wrong. I think they sometimes forget that our pennies make dollars and we work hard for them.

i'm sorry but I dont follow that logic. You can't sell an "ad" link but you can put our ad on your site. And sadly they will probably be glad to sell you ad space for a site they dropped from the search listings.

Must be nice to be the 900lb gorilla.....

 

Just to decrease the competition for them. Anyway drop selling text links

 

How did google determine that you have actually sold links ? did you advertise it on the website ? how about it was banner ads that one was selling ? would they be penalized ?

 

So does this mean CNN, Microsoft, Yahoo, BusinessWeek, Forbes, etc and oher big ones will get hit too.
They obviously sell links too for "paid sponsors", or "advertise here".

 

Are they spider-followable text links?

However, I agree, there's a lot of double standards that need to be addressed before they start penalizing sites.

 

Yeah I have an advertising page. I hope that was not the reason. It sucked cause I had done a bit of work with the keywords and they were starting to bring in traffic

All the ads were text not banner.

 

Maybe you are right but of course there are many other ways to monetize your website other than Google Adsense and selling links. Traffic? create good contents, you will get traffic. Personally, I don't get many traffic from SEs (maybe only around 40-50 per day) but I got around 2,000 unique every day.