PureNews

PureNews is an amazingly sleek and powerful news theme with unlimited color variations.

View full feature list Check out the live demo Buy this theme today

How to get your banned site at the top of Google’s results page

Posted by on 31st Jul 2008 Search Engine Optimisation 49 comments

In the last year there have been many articles about the hypocrisy of Google. Many times they have been guilty of double standards and have bent their own rules to suit themselves too (keep tabs on Michael Gray’s fantastic SEO Blog if you’re curious about some of these double standards). I came across a post today which exposed one of these double standards and is a great example of how Google are happy to break their own rules if theres a dollar to be made.

Ramiro Gómez from SEO-Expert-Blog.com wrote a great post yesterday entitled ‘Google’s Link Marketing Hypocrisy‘. Ramiro’s post is regarding the advertising network Text Link Ads.

Text Link Ads were famously banned from Google due to the nature of their business ie. selling text links that pass PageRank. You will not find TLA on Google if you search for Text Link Ads or their domain name Text-Link-Ads yet if you search for Links the first sponsored listing is Text Link Ads. I would be very surprised if Google were not aware of this so I can only assume that they know about it and are happy to take TLA’s money. Considering that TLA have been penalized by Google it would be safe to say that they are spending a lot of money on AdWords to bring traffic in and perhaps that’s the reason they don’t mind.

Surely Google needs to have some sort of consistency. Surely any site which is banned or penalized from the SERP’s has to be banned from AdWords too. I can only imagine what Google’s unofficial middle man Matt Cutts thinks about this sort of thing. Matt has wrote many posts about the reason Google has penalized those sites whish pass PageRank and whilst I haven’t always agreed with these reasons, I respect Matt for at least discussing it. However, I have yet to see Matt explain some of the double standards Google has been guilty of in the last few years and to be honest, I don’t blame him, as it would be difficult to defend.

What do you think : Should sites which are banned on Google be allowed to use AdWords to get a top listing in the SERP’s?

* Kudos to Ramiro from SEO-Expert-Blog.com for exposing this.

Kevin Muldoon is a webmaster and blogger who lives in Central Scotland. His current project is WordPress Mods; a blog which focuses on WordPress Themes, Plugins, Tutorials, News and Modifications and useful resources such as 101 Places To Find Images For Your Blog Posts.

View my posts Visit my homepage
Recommended Posts
Automated WordPress Sites with Page.ly Automated WordPress Sites with Page.ly 3
Common Plural Rules Common Plural Rules 5
Corporate policy on employee blogs Corporate policy on employee blogs 5
49 comments - Leave a reply