Getting banned for not selling links TechCrunch looks stupid

by Patrick Altoft on October 29, 2007

As a reader of the Google Webmaster Groups nothing annoys me more than people who write posts saying “I’ve done nothing against the Google Guidelines and yet my amazing site has been banned. Why could this have happened?”

Most of the time within 10 minutes somebody has spotted hidden links to porn sites or a nasty redirect.

You can forgive these people to some extent but what you can’t forgive is when these people get a full article on TechCrunch stating that they have been banned for selling links. In this case it took 14 comments before Adrian spotted the site displaying a “hidden div with a load of links to a site selling viagra type crap”.

In comment 24 the site owner admitted “we’ve been hacked”.

The lesson to be learned here is if you want to use a site as an example please take the 10 minutes to check it out first otherwise it just makes you look stupid.

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Published in: Link Building

{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }

1 chipseo 29/10/2007 at 4:57 pm: Well said… before I post ANYTHING to a forum like that I try to find every possible problem, before I post. You are bound to look like an idiot when something is pointed out that is so obvious.

I did post something recently that I just couldn’t figure out and it “looked” like an obvious answer, so I looked stupid at first until we hashed through the issue to try and find what really was the problem.

Thanks for the post. Scott
2 Matt Cutts 30/10/2007 at 6:26 am: I think it’s kinda weird that TechCrunch hasn’t updated their story in any way to mention that the site was hacked to have a bunch of spammy links. If you don’t read the comments, you don’t get the full picture.
3 Patrick Altoft 30/10/2007 at 7:25 am: Agreed Matt, seeing as 600,000 read the feed updating the post might be a good idea!
4 Adrian Lee 30/10/2007 at 5:04 pm: Heh, that was what surprised me a bit about it. For people to call foul, only to discover they do have reasons to be penalised is one thing, but to get an entire Techcrunch article before realising it is something else

I was hoping the actual article might get updated, or maybe they’ed find a site that hasn’t been hacked, or tried it on, as evidence for the articles message. But nope, nothing it seems.

I guess by asking this ‘anonymous SEO’, TechCrunch were trying to fact check, which makes me wonder if they will goto that person again in the future after missing such obvious problems.
Maybe the SEO does know what they are on about, but just didn’t really look at the site, I don’t know, but it was a good job they did stay anonymous