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... DomainTools is selling ads on their site which use a non-"nofollowed anchor link wrapped around image ads, with the link pointing to e.g. a vpslink.com sub-page and the alt text reading e.g. Cheap VPS Hosting. And this may well be against Googles own webmaster guidelines, which disallow such paid links unless they come with a human readable disclosure (like the nofollow" value for links).

However, this may also just be a simple mishap and not necessarily bad intention on DomainTools side, or the advertisers side. For one thing, many text link ad schemes dont use image content, and they also dont often use target URLs like http://vpslink.com/?utm_source=domaintools&utm_medi..., as that may dillute the goal of gaining PageRank. Or reversely put, it looks like this kind of ad spot may be sold for a similar pricing " currently at $10,000/ month " even if DomainTools would add that nofollow value in their template. Especially now theyre in such close neighborhood to Google (though I might be wrong).

In any case, this still looks like something DomainTools may want to fix, and Google would have an interest too in them fixing it... as it would be quite weird if Google would need to ban a site in organic results and then pick it as preferred onebox target above the same organic results.

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