Get Banned by Google for Disclosure Policy

The bane of every search engine optimization expert is getting text links to your site. The articles you read and courses you buy will tell you to email or better yet, call the webmaster and ask for a link. It sounds so simple. But after spending hundreds of hours trying to do it the White Hat way, you'll throw in the towel just like every one before you has.

White Hat, Black Hat SEO

No one wakes up saying its time to go over to the dark side. You'd never tell your mother her son or daughter is a Black Hat search engine optimizer. Desperation makes us do things we're not proud of.

On the other hand, if you see ten thousand sites doing it, it must be ok with the Google god. This is not true. It wasn't true when folks got away with spam like putting your keyword 50 times in a one hundred word article. Sooner or later, they got caught. And I'm glad they did. But this is different.

Its different because in the case of spammy pages, they could be knocked out by the thousands in a singe day. The sites I am seeing banned by Google are the result of hundreds, if not thousands of hours of hard work.

Link Buying

There are reputable websites that have ingenious systems that connect a blogger with a marketer to deliver quality, one way links for a very low fee. They have thousands of great blog sites in their pool that have a high page rank (PR). There are sites that spend $20,000 a month on such services! It all looks up and up, so you jump in. And your site soars in the search engines (serps).

This is a small sample of sites that I'm talking about:

TextLinkBrokers.com Link Building Services

These guys used to openly advertise they sold links. They had a list you could shop. They were just the middleman preforming a valuable service in most people's minds. But Google is a god, and frowned upon this.

Here's what their site says:

"At Textlinkbrokers, we understand that it is important to keep our inventory confidential. This is essential in order to prevent the search engines from penalizing our inventory partners from passing link popularity to our clients. The search engines are actively searching for and penalizing sites that announce they are selling text links."

However, if you get caught, you will be penalized, i.e. Banned by Google. The others, like Bing or Yahoo, really don't do anything as far as I can tell.

Pay Per Post - PayPerPost.com

PayPerPost is a service that allows you to pay bloggers to create content on your behalf. Some use it to have their product or service reviewed and others use it for link building. Here is their requirements for disclosure: https://payperpost.com/terms-of-service/

Sponsored Reviews - sponsoredreviews.com

They area blog review service that connects bloggers willing to write paid posts about the services and products offered by advertisers. It is a great source of low cost text links, too. Here is their requirements for disclosure: http://blog.sponsoredreviews.com/?p=98

Comply With the FTC and Get Banned by Google

But here's the rub: By complying with the requirement that you get paid to say something about a product or website, you are admitting to Google you are violating their best practices. I have seen dozens of sites that have hundreds of urls indexed in Yahoo! and yet have none in Google. You can see this for yourself by finding a site, usually a blog, that has a Disclosure Policy like the one on this site: http://www.pinktun.info/ (its at the bottom of every page), copy and paste it into Yahoo! and most, if not all, will have no urls listed in Google.

Yes, I know you can do the same in Google and thousands of sites will show, but their days are numbered. Google just hasn't banned them yet.

Here's a Solution

Every where there are Warning Statements and now there are Disclosure Statements. These serve a purpose for the public, that is the reader, of website material. They protect the public and I'm fine with that, but I don't want my site to rank #1 on Google for "Warning" or "Disclosure" and I'm sure you don't either.

To avoid this, I recommend you put the statement in a Photo Shop type program, turn it into a picture in JPEG or GIF format and post that on your sites.

If this helps, or if you have a better ideas, please post it in the comments section below. If you avoid being spammy, I'll accept it, I promise.