SIte wide links by google display / adsense

[david305]

hey guys, I had a quick question about my back links that might be coming from adsense.

I am trying to help my father our on his site and help him recover from penguin. unfortunately his company hired some shady SEOers to do "SEO". little did my dad know the BLs he were getting might be spammy, thats what I am checking now.

When I ran a BL report on him ( i use two tools, SEO spyglass and OSE ) i found that there were many "sitewide" links, but i dont think there were placed there by the webmaster, i think they come from adsense. I know he has a PPC campaign where the daily spend is 3k/ day so I know its very possible that this might be the case.

If my tool is picking up BLs from these sites ( which are niche related ) does google count these links for ranking purposes? and might this hurt my rankings if google just sees these as "sitewide links"

[DesignbysoapLtd]

Hi David,

No, I don't think AdSense links would be counted towards rankings and I seriously doubt that AdSense links would hurt your rankings.

It sounds far more likely that they're paid text links (nothing to do with Google), most likely purchased by the former SEO agency. These certainly could damage your rankings, particularly if they're sitewide.

Hope that helps!

[david305]

yea thats what i thought, but i cant find the links?!?! they are on none of these domains.

on one domain i am showing 25 pages with BLs. but i cant find any of my links on there.

[DesignbysoapLtd]

Is it possible that the links have been removed? OSE takes around 4 weeks to update as far as I'm aware, so it could be that the links aren't there anymore.

Do the links show up in GWT? It's possible that the links were being paid for on a monthly basis, which has now stopped so they have been removed.

[david305]

hey john, I am going to get access to GWT monday, but im using SEO powersuite which i think checks it right then and there.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi David,

Sorry to hear your father's site was hit by Penguin. I agree with John that Adsense links will not count as backlinks. Neither OSE nor SEO Spyglass should record Adsense links as such, either.

When searching for links on a page, it's best to look at the source code of the page in question. (right click > view source). Then do a search (control F) and enter the URL of your father's domain. You'll often spot hard to find or hidden links this way a lot easier.

(Another method is to catch Google's cache of the page. (Use the MozBar for this by using the Page Attributes function found by clicking the Magnifying glass icon, and search for the Google cache URL) When you view Google's cached version of the page, hit the link that says "text version". Perform a source search as described above. At the top of the page, Google will tell you the date of the cache. This may indicate to you that the link was once on the page at this time, but since then the page has changed.)

Sometimes links disappear. This is often the case with paid link that require a monthly subscription.

If the links aren't in the source code, then most likely they aren't there anymore. Which is good, because it means you have fewer links to clean up

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

[david305]

cyrus,

wow, thanks so much for replaying to my post, and as a side note, i really enjoyed and learned a lot from your last whiteboard friday post.

yea, i did a lil more research and it turns out that it was his affiliates that were doing it on their own pages. Turns out, they were site-wide sponsor ads on every single page.

site wide sponsor ads are def frowned upon infront of google right?

Anyways, the good thing about this situation is that we know ALL the affiliates by name and can easily contact them ( in the process)  BUT, wont google see a recession of links and might count that to another rankings drop?

Hope to hear back, thanks

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Possibly, but if you were hit by Penguin, those links might be doing you more harm than good right now. If I had a chance in this situation to remove over-optimized, site-wide links, I would.

And you nailed the conundrum of Penguin on the head