# Peace out Thumbtack



## Rbriggs82 (Jul 9, 2012)

Finally Google has wised up and laid the slap down on stupid Thumbtack. :thumbup:

On Sunday, when checking out my rankings and noticed they were wiped completely off google. Prior to then they had the top ranking for every search related to painters with the title "Top 17 Painters in Charleston SC"

For me it's been a long time coming they have been blatantly breaking Googles guidelines for backlinking for a long time now and I was surprised they didn't get hurt with Penguin. 

With them gone I've moved up a spot and have seen a huge influx of traffic (no more catchy title for people to be suckered into), hopefully ya'll will too. :thumbsup:


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## Rbriggs82 (Jul 9, 2012)

Ha! Looks like I was correct, they sent this out this morning. I tried thumbtack a while back and did give them a link for points but long since removed it. 

i Ryan — 

We awarded you 30 progress points on 2012-12-16 for verifying your website by putting a link to Thumbtack on your business website. 

We are removing the 30 progress points and the website verification icon from your profile and the profiles of other professionals. We can no longer offer progress points for website verification by linking to Thumbtack. 

We are making this update because this practice is against Google's policies. We messed up. We shouldn't have given incentives (points or the website verification icon) for linking. Thumbtack always strives to follow Google's policies governing linking, which Google uses as an important signal in determining where different websites rank in search results. 

If you added the link because we awarded you 30 points or the website verification badge – both of which we have now revoked – you should either:
Remove the link from your website, or
Add the rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag of your link.

Please reply to this email when you take either of these actions so we can track this for our records. We have provided instructions removing or updating your link. If you have any questions or want technical help changing your website, please reply to this email or call our support team at: (800) 343-1710. 

We apologize for this inconvenience and are excited to continue to bring you more new customers. 

— The Thumbtack Team

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk


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## George Z (Apr 15, 2007)

Nice! Now they should go after Homestars and others. Almost every contractor in there links to them from their homepage. I am not sure they were offered an incentive to do that. 
Frankly it is a bad thing to do anyway. The Homestars website, Yelp and others take up valuable space ahead of our own contractor sites.


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