I don't know if this is old news or if it's true or not, but I was browsing through some of ShoeMoney's blog posts and saw that he switched one of his sites to YPN and got promptly delisted. From other commenters, it looks like it wasn't a one time deal either. Anyone else seen this black listing? http://www.shoemoney.com/2005/12/20/when-google-decides-your-no-longer-of-value/
Might just be a short term glitch-coincidence, but probably not worth spending too much time thinking about. Google have some pretty smart folk and I reckon their strategists will obviously want to ensure that G is seen as fair. If they butcher their results by denying sites with YPN etc, Joe-public looking for results relevant to their search criteria will simply look elsewhere, effectively destroying the very foundations of G. I can't see that as a sensible long term business model that would make G shareholders happy.
Google does a lot of things it will never admit to - and in fact will lie to your face about. Ever heard of the sandbox? ... hahahaha! ... Yeah, ok Google, it doesn't exist.
I got kicked outta google and my site got delisted. I know this for a fact. I emailed them about it and they didn't even answer it. Google is a bunch of crooks.
My site has never really been in G for my competitive keywords, but I do also run YPN ads. I decided to run PHPAdsNew, to help distinguish us vs non us visitors. Since you generate your own ad code for any type of ad you run with that script, it might effectively hide the fact from the G bots that I'm running YPN ads. BONUS if it's true......could be a way around this *possible* dilemma. J
I was told directly from a few google people there is no penalty for switching to YPN. The interesting thing was that they would not deny a BOOST for running Adsense
You know, now that I think about it...I do have a site that gets around 1100 search engine visitors/day for some competitive key phrases, and it only started taking off when I started using Adsense. Bizarre.
see? now imagine 80% of sites run google ads and they get a boost in Google ranking and those that don't run adsense don't get penalized but get no boost either. Same content, the same number of backlinks, which site do you think is gonna rank better? Google say do no evil but to their servants. I hate Google and I hope that one day Yahoo! will be number one again
Ive switched nearly all of my sites over to Yahoo, and they each are listed on Google... and most are all listed on pages 1-5 for my primary keywords. It might be when you have their ads and yahoo ads running at the same time? I know that is against their ToS and could probably result in a ban from adsense, but im not sure about being delisted.
I think that says it all. Big boys with money now control GOOG - this behaivour isn't suprising when you consider AdSense is only one of two revenue sources for G. Imagine the extra pulled in from giving such 'boosts'? It's dirty and appauling, but that's business. Pete
I was doing some thinking about this last night and I think I might have an idea as to why Google is delisting sites that use YPN. Keep in mind that this is actually partly Yahoo's fault. I was using YPN on my site with no problem. However, it wasn't until after I changed my background to a very light blue (hardly distinguishable from white, but enough to see a difference) that I got delisted. This may be a coincidence so I think we need to see if anyone else who was delisted did something similar. Look at this bug in YPN which causes YPN to display their "ads by yahoo" text using a white font even when the background is almost exactly white. I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure Google delists sites for "hidden text" and I'd say that this YPN bug may have caused google to ban the site for "hidden text." The good news is that Google will reinclude sites banned for hidden text within 2-6 weeks as opposed to the normal 2-6 months. The bad news is that I do not know much about Google's policies and I could be totally wrong. Thoughts? Am I right or is this a farfetched idea?
Well Shoemoney was using an extremely pale 'Ads by Yahoo' on an extremely pale background to the YPN! ads on his blog a while back - you could hardly tell it said Ads by Yahoo. If he is doing this on the sites that we're de-indexed then that would explain it I think? I don't know how javascript works or how Google crawls it.. nor do I know Shoe was doing this on his site(s) that were de-indexed. Pete
You are correct in that using hidden text will get you banned from the G index--and fast. But if the "Ads by Yahoo" text matches your page's background color, I am quite certain that won't get you banned. The G algo is sophisticated; sophisticated enough, I'm sure, to be able to discern between spam hidden text and a YPN color matching idiosyncrasy. As always, IMO. AmCy