“Text Link Ads” Was Latest Hit By Google’s Actions Against Link Sellers

On May 15th, we reported that Google targeted yet another link selling network that resulted in several thousand penalties.

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, has revealed which link network was the target via Twitter last week. The target was one of the oldest, and arguably the most prominent, link selling brokers on the Internet, Text Link Ads. Matt said, “you might have noticed a big drop in PageRank on thousands of TLA linkselling sites a couple weeks ago.” Matt added that this specifically targeted “capital TLA.”

The Text Link Ads web site currently has a PageRank of 6 but according to Matt, the ones that were hit were the link sellers and several thousand of them.

Here is Matt’s tweet:

@mikrutd you might have noticed a big drop in PageRank on thousands of TLA linkselling sites a couple weeks ago.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 29, 2013

Matt recently published a video that included a warning about Google’s plans to go “upstream” in its fight against spammy links. He also offered a specific warning against link networks at our SMX West conference in March.

That warning at SMX West came just days after Google hit another link network (believed to be SAPE Links). In March 2012, we also wrote about Google’s takedown of the BuildMyRank.com link network.

Text Link Ads, also known as TLA, was founded almost ten years ago by Patrick Gavin and Bill Fish. They later sold the company to MediaWhiz, which recently sold the company to Matomy Media Group. Both Patrick and Bill are no longer with the company.