Has Google Nuked Text Link Ads?

by Patrick Altoft on June 20, 2007

Text-Link-Ads.com has dropped right down the Google rankings today for the search term “Text Link Ads“. TLA has enjoyed number one rankings for a long time for this phrase and some people are no doubt speculating that Google has given them some kind of manual penalty.

Rankings come and go all the time but its rare to see a long standing site drop from number 1 to number 43.

I think TLA are a great company and their site is clearly a leader in the field so I hope its just a temporary issue.

Text Link Ads on Google

Any ideas whats going on? Matt Cutts if you are reading this have you any comments?

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.

You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.

Read some similar posts

{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }

John King 21 Jun 2007 at 3:24 am

Perhaps its because their site never mentions the words “text link ads”. They always say “TLA” even in their meta description.

Patrick Altoft 21 Jun 2007 at 3:57 am

I think they changed it today, the cached version has Text Link Ads.
Maybe they are trying to get the rankings back.

SEbast 03 Jul 2007 at 12:33 am

I searched for a lot of their keywords on their site and they seem to appear around the 50 position for everything. I was wondering about this and found your site searching for it.

I bet http://www.linkworth.com is enjoying the top spot for their name.

Liz Camps 01 Aug 2007 at 9:45 pm

Is there any way we can get a direct commentary from Google about whether they did a “hand job” on Text Link Ads, and/or how they feel about ‘TLA’s service?

Nick 04 Sep 2007 at 10:58 pm

You think Google would actually reply to that? If Google does tamper with their SERPs then i doubt they would admit it

Patricia Rogers 28 Jan 2009 at 2:10 am

It looks like that this is manual intervention by Google’s staffs. I have been purchasing a lot text links for my clients both at Ask2link.Com Text Links and Text Link Ads and . Text-Link-Ads is probably the biggest and they indeed charge a lot, and Ask2link.com is more affordable, but it looks like that the other site is also penalized recently.

Leave a Comment (registration is optional)

Registration is free, takes about 5 seconds and is worth doing.

You can use these HTML tags and attributes:
<a href=""> <b> <blockquote> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>