A spur-of-the-moment observation. "Banned from Google" is a trifle messed up. Consider: I see a news story like this one. I want to find out more (how do they pitch this stuff? etc). I go search for IAcquire in Goog...... awww.
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.
By 'penalizing' sites for bad links, Google is opening a lot of scary doors. Historically, they've instead devalued bad links which makes a lot more sense to me.
Penalizing a site for websites that link to them simply isn't fair. There is no way for a website owner to control that.
As someone who attends (and occasionally speaks at) SEO conferences, I can say #1 I'm glad and #2 Google needs to do this MUCH more.
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.
The market won't take Google's Webmaster Guidelines seriously until someone loses a few hundred million in revenue, or at least enterprise value when they violate them.
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.
The fact that news like this are so rarely brought into light is the real news. People want their rankings to improve yesterday. If you won't tell them we can move you up to the first page or #1 in X amount of days, someone else will say it. At GrowTap, I've never promised any results to anyone - which loses us plenty of customers. But, at least I don't have to worry about the sky falling down or crushing some poor guy's small business.
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.
I have received many requests from iAcquire to put paid links on my tech blog. This is a violation of Gooogle's Webmaster guidelines (https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...), and I personally don't want that type of advertising on my site.
I operate a site that I haven't touched in a few years. It gets decent traffic but doesn't earn me anything. When iAquire approached me I accepted - and it's been a decent extra monthly income. I think it'd be near impossible for Google to shut down each site that was paid to link something.
Curious: why is this considered bad and textlinkads and Adwords OK? This is a genuine question.
Textlinkads is not OK with Google. All paid links should have the rel="nofollow" attribute, as all Adwords ads do. That tells Google not to count them as editorial endorsement.
I don't know exactly what this iAquire does, but a "search marketing agency" sounds like a spammer by definition.
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.
It's because AdWords links don't pass along credit that helps with search rankings. Google actually doesn't ban for paid links. It bans (potentially) for selling or buying links with the intention of improving your search rankings. There are several ways to have links that are sold that prevent that credit from passing.
has the (serverside) iAquire widget any markup (ul, li, divs, spans, table - layout) that stays the same over the whole network? if yes, then its pretty easy to identify the whole network for them.
They do not. They simply request a link... and most of the time request it in the middle of your content, written in like it's a natural link you happened to think was appropriate to your audience.
Thanks for all the answers guys - a clarity I appreciate and will take action on.
>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.
did you do google-toolbar (green) pagerankbar - tracking (also called thoughtcancerbar - but that's another story) actually the only good use of the green pagerank-bar in the google toolbar is to find out if a site got a trust penalty and/or has been strapped of the possibility to set valuable links. lets say you have a thoughtcancerbar value of 6/10. you implement your paid links serverside widget (or any other kind of paid links), the value drops from one day to the other of 2 to 3 points. now you have a thoughtcancerbar of 3/10 - well, they know about the network, you have been found and hit.
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.
I have actually made a couple thousand dollars on my personal blog from iAcquire paying me to add a sentence or two for x days or $x/wk to blog posts. Should I worry about this or am I fine as far as Google is concerned?
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.
What is scary about this is that iAcquire was deindexed by Google for something that they did to a client's site. Their own site was penalized despite having no violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
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.
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.)