Hi guys. Am in the midst of making up my mind about TLA. Throughout the PR adjustments over the last two months, I saw my PR went from 4 to 2, and now to 0. (I don't do PPP - TLA is the only form of paid links on my site) All along I didn't care because I thought TLA's bringing me a good little side income, and my PR dropping hasn't affected my Google search traffic nor my Adsense income. But now I've read that if people still don't heed the PR reductions as a warning, worse things such as dropping off the index may be to come - which would mean no Google search traffic at all. Even though it isn't the biggest chunk of my traffic, it is still a big chunk. (Article below has nothing to do with TLA but talks a bit about the why and what of Google's recent actions) http://courtneytuttle.com/2007/11/20/realrank-doesnt-solve-anything-for-bloggers/ So my question is: have any of you stopped using TLA? And did it help in your reconsideration request via Google's webmaster tools?
I have removed the TLA's again from my site. Google has removed all my pages from the index, for all relevant keywords in my niche. And Google has to much power.
@MyOwn: Ouch. That's what I'm afraid of. I'm thinking to cash out end of this month and then remove it. Just wondering if it would do any good this late in the game.
I took TLA off about 3 months ago. It didn't stop my PR falling though, so I often wonder why I didn't leave it on.
@Rasputin: hmm, now it's beginning to be confusing. Am assuming that you don't do paid-posts or sell links on your site? At first when I dropped to 2, I thought that'd be it. But my site suffered two rounds of reductions. The most recent being just three weeks ago.
No I don't do paid posts or sell links. Although my site fell from 5 to 4 and then to 3 it didn't fall to zero in the most recent reduction (although lots of internal pages did), so perhaps that was because of taking off the TLA? Lots of people appear to have had falling PR while professing not to sell links (including problogger etc) which confuses the picture a bit. I had some links in from directories which were penalised, so that could partly explain why my own PR fell, rather than because of TLA. izwanmad, as far as I know the 'PR penalty' has not affected people's SERPS (so far). If your SERPS have fallen or your site disappeared from the index that could be a different problem.
Google won't remove sites from the index for selling links - it would very likely be illegal and Google would face a lot of court cases. Google is approaching this in a much more sensible way by discounting paid links and stopping sites from passing page rank. This is what we have been told by Matt Cutts (Google Spam fighter) from 2005. Also a drop in PR (which does nothing other than effect the greenbar) to spread a little Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. It appears tobe working on a lot of people.
@Jason Green: there is indeed a lot of FUD around. With regards to the PR drops, I wonder then why didn't they just drop them in one go, rather than the two stages that we saw? Or was that just to f*ck with our heads too?