Skip to main content

Google’s War against Paid Links continues

Google’s War against Paid Links continues
As recently as last week, it was J.C. Penny who was making headlines for falling drastically in Google’s rankings for nearly every area from curtains to area rugs. It turned out that the retail site had a number of suspicious looking links pointing towards it and that could all be traced back to a paid link network, which intended to manipulate the ranking algorithms set by Google.

In order to protect their unpaid search goal, Google provides some of the most relevant results for browsers. This is why Google has begun hunting down these types of manipulations and knocks down the rankings of the sites belonging to the guilty parties.

After the J.C. Penney case, then came the Forbes.com case. Forbes ran afoul in Google’s eyes with regards to the guidelines. Forbes was found to be selling links on their site in order to manipulate the PageRanks.

Now, in a recent announcement, it was found that Overstock.com also has lost out on rankings for using other types of links that Google views as manipulating the algorithms. And in the middle of all of this, the company got a lot of publicity lately for running a paid link network, and have now announced that they will be getting out of the link business altogether.

Overstock.com also suffered the same fate as J.C. Penney recently, with their rankings disappearing from all searched that they used to rank high for previously. Examples are the laptop computers and vacuum cleaners.

But then what really happened? Overstock didn’t go the usual way and use link networks to buy links, but instead what they did was create a sort of program in which they provided discounts on products in exchange for links from .edu sites.

Comments