Michael Arrington of TechCrunch writes Wednesday that Forbes.com began removing paid links on its site after a request from Google on Monday, but didn’t remove all of them.
Arrington writes, “We’ve been watching these links come down, but they seem to have forgotten one page. See the bottom right of this page for paid links to Netsuite, AppRiver, Bluepay, SquareSpace and others, all with very nice descriptive keywords like ‘ecommerce,’ ‘Create a Website,’ etc. Previous links to Siemens and AT&T were prevalent, and those links still appear on eWeek and CIO Magazine.
“As Barry Schwartz noticed today, Forbes received and posted a notice from Google ‘encouraging’ Forbes to remove the links ‘that could be intended to manipulate PageRank.’
“Denis Pinsky, Forbes Digital Marketing Manager, thinking that Forbes had now removed the links (oops), played dumb: ‘Can someone help figure out what Links are in violation?’
“Happy to help, Forbes. Next time, try to get rid of all of the evidence before denying everything.”
Read more here.
