We’ve reported before on the confusing mixed messages Google is sending out regarding paid links. Their Webspam department headed by their own representative to the SEO/SEM/blogging community, Matt Cutts has repeatedly issued pronouncements against the evil (there’s that word again) practice of link selling. He even has a post about how to report paid links.
However, any cursory look at any given day at the main page of an extremely popular webmaster/affiliate marketing forum routinely shows adsense ads for link sellers. Okay, keep in mind the difference between people that submit your site to get free one way backlinks and actual brokers of links. What is the difference? Submitters just submit your link and there’s no guarantee that the directory sites, blog owners, or third party sites will accept your link. Actual brokers of links outright sell PAGERANK for cash. There’s even trading platform for blog owners selling links to advertisers. Google has swung it’s PAGERANK PENALTY HAMMER more than once. The most dramatic being its PR beatdown of bloggers for Izea/Payperpost. But apparently, its okay if similar link sellers advertise on Adwords?
Truly a WTF moment. Specially if you consider the fact that Google uses the same pay to link type of shenanigans when trying to compete in Japan. Just shows you how inconvenient business reality can sometimes get, right? Right… Are we still in “Don’t be evil” territory?
Definitely a confusing situation. Be careful of public networks that outright list your site with links to sell and your url appears in a database. It’s not that hard to join such networks and spider a database.
If you can, don’t sell links on your own sites at all. But if you can’t avoid it, definitely study the situation more closely. The stakes are quite high in this game… and getting higher.
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A few established SEO practitioners run this software that maps out a site’s backlink structure. These maps look very interesting, to say the least. Some look like a Carlos Castaneda flashback while others are so damn predictable it’s scary–specially for the clients of such SEO “expertise”. Predictablity, in SEO, is the home of FAIL. Google routinely destroys the PR and link marketability of people who sell or buy links. That’s why SEO “flowers” are so dangerous…
What are SEO “Flowers”?
Quick background: Linkwheels are Web 2.0 pages/blogs that are built specifically to pump up the Page rank of and pump link juice to a target site. Think of it as an amplifier for SEO. There’s many “Get 10000000000 hits per day” huckster ebooks and sales pages pushing this concept. However, it’s very easy to do and anyone with some time on their hands for page building, content copywriting, and mapping can build these. The typical structure is SITE A links to SITE B and Target site, SITE B links to SITE C and target site, etc. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that this typical link map looks like a FLOWER. Indeed, that’s how it looks on a link mapping application. Something like this:
While flowers are great for enhancing the ambiance of most rooms or as gifts for the object of your affection, they are DEADLY in the SEO realm. Easy to track (and easy to ban) link structures give the kiss of death to any SEO strategy. Make sure you DIVERSIFY your linking structure. There mustn’t be any readily discernible pattern in your link map or else your network and your target site might look like a daisy that got crushed under Google’s boot heel. Not a pleasant sight.
Photo credits: law_keven
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A trusted and highly esteemed colleague of mine who does real well with Adsense recently told me that all his sites running Adsense have been banned from Google. He runs tons of other sites using differing sponsors and those sites have remained in Google’s index.
How do you know if your site is banned from google? Do a search for site:YOURDOMAIN.com If your site’s listings appear, you are not banned.
This banning seems very odd since he took great pains to use the following:
Differing class C ips
Differing Whois registrars
Differing niches
Differing designs/layouts
All original niche-specific content
In fact, all factors were different. The only point of commonality is the Adsense Publisher ID.
Based on this information, it seems that the following is happening:
Google is “punishing” perceived “violations” of its policies by banning the offending sites through Adsense. My colleague did nothing wrong–the sites weren’t scraped, he used only original content. The links were completely white hat. Note that he did not get banned from Adsense but from Google. Terrible implications for people building Made For Adsense (MFA) sites.
MFA sites get a bad rap because QUALITY made for adsense networks (like my colleague’s) are often lumped, unfairly, with cookie-cutter template-driven low content quality/scraped content sites. Google’s been going after MFA sites with, it seems, indiscriminate shots from its BAN shotgun and it seems many legitimate publishers are caught in the blast range.
Leave a comment and let me know if you’ve suffered the same fate or know anyone who has.
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