Web Directory

In a recent post by David Airey, How I reversed my Google rank penalty. David explains why he was penalized by Google and the steps he took to get it removed. One of the text links he was selling was provided by Text Link Ads (TLA).

What?s interesting about those two paid links that Matt mentions, is that the one for business card printing was automatically placed in my sidebar, after I signed up for Text Link Ads (TLA). When you sign up for TLA?s service, you install a plugin on your blog, and your site details are placed in the TLA marketplace. If someone wants to add a link to your blog, they pay TLA, you get 50% of the money, and the link to the customer?s site is placed on yours automatically. As far as I can remember, there?s no screening process.

The TLA website, whilst having a Google Page Rank of 7/10, doesn?t appear anywhere relevant when conducting a search via Google, so they seem to have a similar penalty imposed on them.

What?s also interesting, is that I had removed the TLA plugin, and stopped using their service, at the beginning of September. My Google penalty was imposed around September 18th, so it?s fair to say that I was doing a few things wrong.

To be honest this thought never occurred to me. I have used their service on a few other sites and it surely could make an impact. A very good point that David brings up is that these pad links for the most part are unfiltered and usually very unrelated to your site content. One thing this might verify is that Google is looking for unrelated ads also and not just entry pages that say “Your Link Here” etc. Definitely, some food for thought there. Wonder what kind of impact this will have on TLA’s overall business and other link selling company’s like it.

David offers 3 tips to help get your penalization lifted.

* Don?t participate in any form of black hat SEO
* Add the rel=?nofollow? tag to any paid links on your website
* Be careful not to link to bad neighbourhoods

Most importantly, I think we should spread the word about this as it didn’t occur to me and I am sure others have overlooked this small fact.