IAcquire Banned From Google After Link Buying Allegations
searchengineland.com
searchengineland.com
I go search for IAcquire in Bing. Right. There they are. I mean, I could have guessed the domain name, but I could have guessed wrong. I guess I'm probably not the #1 use case here, but shouldn't a search for IAcquire return IAcquire even if you're penalizing them lots in other ways?
It violates the spirit of what I expect from Google in a small way. Mind you, a small one.
(Postscript. The site was approximately of the same quality as I had been expecting.)
For years they have said, "Don't do this. Don't do that" but never enforced those positions with any real backup until the past 18 months.
Don't write crappy content. Bam! Panda update Feb 24th, 2011.
Don't get crappy links. Bam! Penguin update last month.
The stick has come out from Google on cracking down on what they have been telling SEOs and webmasters for years.
SEOs will be fine. They are a very adaptable group. My concern is more for the small business owner who hires someone that doesn't disclose the tactics they are using.
It's a crazy time in SEO-land. But no one can say that there wasn't warning.
With iAcquire I see this as Google's shot across the bow to paid links. They dealt with bad content last year, then bad links/optimization last month, and I think the next enforcement will be around paid links.
Penalizing a site for websites that link to them simply isn't fair. There is no way for a website owner to control that.
I would think Google penalizes the sellers, and only if they can nearly 100% confirm that the site linked to initiated the link, then the link buyer.
In the past Google would just take away PR from link sellers, but not de-index them.
There are 2 problems:
#1 links are still very potent,
#2 JC Penney and Overstock got a public lashing, they had all of their rankings back within 90 days.
It's a classic downward spiral: cheaters get rankings, traffic, revenue, all of which helps them cheat better (or cover their tracks to look legit), which deprives the WG-followers of equal opportunity.
It's really shocking just how forward they are with explaining everything - but I guess at that point they knew the guy was writing the article one way or another. Was wondering where Conductor's link buying operation went, and now I know.
Curious: why is this considered bad and textlinkads and Adwords OK? This is a genuine question.
Thanks for all the answers guys - a clarity I appreciate and will take action on.
To answer your question: it might be because paid links are considered unacceptable by Google, and because texlink ads and other Google advertising is actually marked as advertising. Paid links are a type of spam, are dishonest, and are now an FTC violation unless explicitly disclosed on every page that contains them.
"Not all paid links violate our guidelines.... Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such."
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
>I am not aware of another agency that was banned by Google for this practice.
Isn't it possible that Google caught iAcquire buying links (or engaging in some other form of SEO spam) for their own domain, and that's why it was delisted? If they were willing to do it for clients, certainly they were willing to do it for themselves.
On an unrelated note: check out the first comment thread on that article. Each response gets thinner and thinner until it is finally just a single character on each line. That's fun.
the fun thing is, that the paid link network provider know exactly when this happens to their publishers, and they know exactly what it means (that their network is useless to their "advertisers" + harmful to their publishers) but well, that doesn't stop them from keep on selling links and getting new publishers on board. it's a shitty business.
The line that reads "Many of the Dell Laptop deals now include the Mini 10v and 11 at several hundred dollars less than the cheapest iPad." and links to Dell.
These ridiculous penalties by Google have already opened the floodgates for negative SEO. This penalty proves that you can pay somebody to build spam links into another site, write a blog post 'outing' them for this practice and then Google might remove them from the index.