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Text Link Ads - the Google Hypocrisy

The now infamous SES San Jose session on paid links this summer sparked a lot of debate, discussion, agreement and disagreement about its rights and wrongs. To familiarise yourself with the whole debate, the best round up / commentary was probably the one by SEOmoz. If you read further into the surrounding coverage you will hear Michael Gray (aka graywolf)’s presentation being mentioned a lot (he was on the panel making Matt Cutts cringe). That, for your perusal can be found over at wolf-howl.com (definitely worth a read).

This post however, is not about me having my 2 pence worth on whether paid links are right / wrong, what should be done about them etc. - I have my own views on that which I will talk about separately. I wanted to highlight a point that was touched upon in graywolf’s presentation about a Google decision which completely undermines their own link buying / selling stance.

So, you shouldn’t buy links, sell links, link schemes are bad yada yada yada. Now, anyone who has been involved in SEO in the past couple of years will have heard of Text-Link-Ads.com - probably the biggest text link broker around. I.e. a company who profits from helping many websites break Google’s guidelines. You would think therefore, that Google wouldn’t allow this to happen:

Yep, you got it, Google allowing them (and lots of similar companies) to advertise their (webmaster-guideline-contravening) services via PPC. Surely if the impact of paid links on Google SERP’s were that much of an issue (which they most definitely are), Google should not allow such blatant advertising of these services. Conflict of interests on Google’s part? Without a doubt.

An additional point worth noting is that searches for “textlinkads”, “text-link-ads”, and any other brand (but not domain) specific searches won’t show text-link-ads.com until way down page 2, if not further at present (this used to be worse - they appeared to be suffering a minus 50 penalty until recently - i.e. the best possible position for any search term is 51).

Now I haven’t looked in detail as to what might have caused that (i.e. if there were any shady SEO tactics going on) but the cynic in me says its part of their crackdown on the paid links industry. Funny though, how they have conveniently forgotten to employ a similar crackdown on such services via adwords ads, meaning that Text Link Ads now have to pay for all their Google traffic. Looks like revenue was the winner, ethics the loser in this internal battle. Hmmm…..

If you’re wondering why the lack of link love for text-link-ads.com I don’t want to risk being seen as linking to a ‘bad neighbourhood’ and lose all search engine traffic before I even have any