

IAcquire Banned From Google After Link Buying Allegations - bhartzer
http://searchengineland.com/iacquire-banned-from-google-after-link-buying-allegations-122414

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fennecfoxen
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.)

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scottkrager
Google is done playing nice.

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.

~~~
trevin
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.

~~~
scottkrager
I agree with you there.

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.

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jcc80
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.

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evanw
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...](https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736)),
and I personally don't want that type of advertising on my site.

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shawnc
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.

~~~
sullivandanny
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.

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jbenz
Very interesting. From the article:

> _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.

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agbell
I have a site that IAcquire pays to put 'advertising' on and it is still
indexed in google.

~~~
franze
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.

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RKearney
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?

~~~
Matt_Cutts
I'd be happy to confirm whether the links are outside our guidelines or not;
which blog was this?

~~~
RKearney
<http://blog.ryankearney.com/2010/01/ipad-vs-hp-mini-netbook/>

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.

~~~
jeffnappi
Looks like a perfectly relevant link to me.

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trevin
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.

~~~
nym
Source?

