Google has notified Forbes.com, Forbes magazine's website for selling links on their site, for the second time. This event came to notice when Denis Pinsky, the Digital Marketing Manager at Forbes.com, posted a thread on the Google Webmaster Help page with the notification warning that was sent by Google.
Here is Denis' message – “I have read the FAQs and checked for similar issues: YES
My site's URL (web address) is: http://www.forbes.com/
Description (including timeline of any changes made): received a message (GWT detected unnatural links on http://www.forbes.com/ and http://forbes.com/).” Denis also added in the public forum, saying, “Can someone help figure out what Links are in violation?”
The full message sent to Forbes.com reads, “Dear site owner or webmaster of www.forbes.com
We’ve detected that some or all of your pages are using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which are available here.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. For more information about our linking guidelines, visit.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please visit to submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043 ”
Arrington from TechCrunch, noticed the links. He pointed out the pages where they are selling links for PageRank purposes (on pages like forbes.com/ebusiness on the bottom right), check the image below:
Arrington also said that Forbes began deleting the links from their site since Monday, but that Forbes seem to have forgotten a page. See the above image, notice the keywords like ecommerce, Create a Website, etc.
Forbes responded (along with deleting the pages) by saying that the links (unnatural links) were on their legacy pages that some how, by mistake, went live during a site redesign. Well, what do we know? However, to think that Forbes is aware of Google's way of working, and that they were also already penalized once back in 2007 for the same reason.
Recommend this story
Navneet Kaushal, CEO PageTraffic is a trusted authority in the search engine marketing industry. He is a featured author at Web Pro News, Search Newz, Promotionworld, Website Notes, DevWebPro, SEO Article and Web Help Now among many others.
Follow Navneet Kaushal on Google +.
@pagetraffic
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I think Google is trying to send a strong message to webmasters. If you are selling or buying links in 2011, watch out!
I mentioned this on my blog as well.
{ 20 trackbacks }