I think I was right

November 16, 2007 | Posted by Sapphire

I said in a comment on Mark’s Blog that I imagined the recent pagerank slap had been achieved in part by Googlebots somehow detecting the use of big text link agencies like text link ads. Yesterday, I got an email from TLA asking me to update my Wordpress plugins.

The new plugin forces you to make up a name for it – “blahblah.php”(ETA: TLA’s plugin download page changed this morning and now says “This is used to name the plugin file and help avoid automated detection.”) The old links were all “tla_12345.php” with the numbers varying. They also suggest not having any header at all above your links (the safest way to dance the line between misleading people with a header that doesn’t clearly say “Hey, look, paid links!” and avoiding alerting Google.

So Googlebots were somehow detecting a “tla_…” plugin and instantly penalizing everyone who uses that system for selling links. If I’m right, just having it installed, even if you killed your paid links, could get you a penalty. Of course, this wasn’t an issue for people who stuck to LinkWorth and other services that let you copy/paste straight HTML.

I also don’t doubt that just having an aff link for TLA could generate a penalty. Certainly Google could detect that, and since aff links maybe sorta probably come under the heading of “evil paid links”, it wouldn’t surprise me.

So now TLA is trying to game Google right back. If Google can’t distinguish a paid link from an unpaid one, they rely completely on the witch-hunt method, which is nothing but a tool for competitor sabotage, and Google must realize it.

This just confirms for me that Google’s whole paid link war was nothing but an attempt to game people away from TLA and pals and onto Adsense; and now TLA is gaming Google back. Whatever, folks!

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