There are strong signs of manual action taken against another Polish link network.
It’s another official manual action against Polish link networks this year – the previous one was announced straight by Matt Cutts via Twitter:
@bart_goralewicz Yes. I didn’t tweet about it because people have been asking us to be more positive, but yes.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) 3 lipca 2014
Earlier today, Bartosz asked Karolina via Twitter about possible manual action on one of the Polish link networks:
@bart_goralewicz Tak , podjęliśmy działania przeciwko jednemu z systemów wymiany linków.
— Karolina Kruszyńska (@karo_krus) 24 listopada 2014
After a quick research, I’ve noticed that manual action was taken on Prolink.pl – both on domains emitting links and on clients who used this particular link network to get rankings.
How does Prolink.pl work?
As Bartosz wrote in his earlier post about polish link networks, there are two types of link networks in Poland – static and dynamic. Prolink.pl is a static link network offering both selling and buying links in different parts of their website:
- under menu
- in sidebar
- as a heading
- as a text link from content
Mostly it looks like this: http://twoje-nieruchomosci.net/
Why Prolink.pl was hit?
After doing a fast HTML source code check with NerdyData, you can see that the source code that you need to add produces a pattern that can be easily used for Prolink domain hunting:
(‘prolink.php’); ?>
Below you can see some results from that particular code:
Going deeper results in getting more domains.
It was the simplest footprint taken straight from their admin panel – it’s worth being said that Prolink supports other publishing platforms like WordPress, which adds another potential footprint to analyze.
Update
There is an official statement from Prolink.pl:
We do confirm information that both Publishers and Advertisers got penalized by Google for using Prolink link network. In order to better understand what happened we are suspending our link network starting from today, 24th of November. Suspending the system means all queued links will be removed, but accounts will be active. We are asking users to send us information:
– how many of your services selling links in our network got penalized?
– did you use other link networks while working on Prolink.pl?
All those information will allow us to fix the issues and modify it in order to adapt to these changes.
ProLink Team
