JLH Design Blog

Google has penalized some sites for buying links and others for selling links. Personal blogs with no revenue stream have their rankings stripped while large brands carry on selling and buying links.

Why?

From the Navy Safety Center:

Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, all of the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result, and all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon the monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be attacked.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm! Likewise, replace a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth.

Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked. Most of the monkeys that are beating him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey. After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana.

Why not? Because as far as they know, that’s the way it’s always been done around there.

They don’t have to punish all the link buyers, not even the big ones, just get enough people talking about it and the rest will follow. If I were looking for monkeys I’d find the most vocal ones perhaps those involved in online forums, social media, and discussion groups. You wouldn’t want to waste your time going after trusted newspapers that sell links for $195 a year, specially when they offer:

Your search engine rankings will also improve by receiving a link on our sites!

While you’ll be less dependent on people having to search for your site, your search engine rankings will be improved for those that do.

“PageRank interprets a link from Page A (our sites) to Page B (your site) as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page’s importance by the number of votes it receives. PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value.” – Google Support site

“The best way to ensure that Google finds your site is to have pages on other relevant sites to link to yours.” – Google Support site

~Hat tip to Wingnut for the Monkey Quote, the link seller outing was my own doing.

I promise no more RickRolling, and apologize to the 100+ people yesterday that were redirected…this is real.

The Google Webmaster Chat was a huge success as reported in many prominent places such as Search Engine Roundtable.

The online chat involved several multi-media avenues in which to communicate between the many Googlers who participated in the meeting and the 200+ webmasters.

1. A free-for-all chat room type interface, the transcript of which can be read here. [PDF]
2. A question and answer section where webmasters posted questions and Googlers answered, the transcript is located here. [PDF]
3. Webmasters called in, or were called, to listen into the presentation by a dozen or so Googlers in conference call with Googlers in Mountain View, Kirkland, and Zurich. The audio recording of that section was saved in this Brasil SEO site.

My Portuguese skills are little rusty don’t exist, but according to the Google Translation it appears as the author is recommending you download the files, which I did. To help save his bandwidth I’ve mirrored the files here, be sure to link to the original source in your own discussion.

Audio Chat Part 1 (mp3)

Audio Chat Part 2 (mp3)

Audio Chat Part 3 (mp3)

Note: The much debated PageRank sculpting discussion starts right at the beginning of part 3.

A transcribed version of the audio portion can be found here.

This just in from DaveN that he has an example and a confirmation from Google that they’ve actually done more than a visible PageRank reduction for a link seller.

It all started when Dave posted about a friend’s site that was no longer showing for it’s money keywords, in his words:

…because I know where they used to rank for t-shirt printing

The assumption was that they’ve done nothing spammy to deserve the penalty.

Matt Cutts stopped by to add:

“what do you do when you know you haven’t do anything wrong, but Google still gives you a penalty”

e-examine your assumptions? E.g. http://web.archive.org/web/20070817163057/http://www.indigoclothing.com/blog/ is a link that shows when they were selling links. Later versions of their site were selling even more links, e.g. “sexy underwear” links.

Google has been very clear about how we feel about selling/buying links. If indigoclothing.com has dropped their text link ads and remove the links that they sold, they could do a reconsideration request. According to the data I looked at, the site has never done a reconsideration request.

So now we can get on with the business of actually earning links now that Google is actually going to start reducing the rankings of sites selling links. The visible PageRank reduction caused quite a stir, but in the end all I kept reading about it was that peoples rankings and traffic didn’t change. Sort of a non-penalty.

A quick check of the web’s most notorious link seller shows them still indexed and still ranking. Google must be going after the small time TLA sites first before tackling the worst offenders. Google still recommends buying links from Yahoo! in their guidelines, but those are slow to update as the help for the Reconsideration Request still says it’s for deindexed sites:

If your site is not included in Google’s search results, and you believe that it does not violate our webmaster guidelines, you can ask Google to reconsider your site for inclusion in the index.

This is clearly not the case as shown by this very example.

Don’t even bother submitting without a popular avatar or at least submitting an A-list site, it isn’t going hot.

Hot Topic’s Screenshot

I wante to patent the term MLSGB Penalty which is the My Link Scheme Got Busted Penalty..

The penalty presents itself as a sitewide deranking and no amount of on-page optimization or writing of reconsideration requests will fix it.

The problem is that your site which has built its reputation on crappy free directory listings, link exchanges, and automated text link purchases has been busted. Google has figured it out and systematically devalued the majority of your links. After all of those crap links are filtered what’s left is not much and the rankings you used to enjoy will not be found again until you can build your link profile back up to the level you were getting credit for, this time with real links. The MLSGB Penalty tends to be doled out in sectors by devaluing crap links in clusters.

Symptoms of this are:

• Reconsideration requests go unanswered no matter if you’ve removed other offending schemes.
• Sitewide PageRank drops
• Same number of pages indexed but long-tail results are way down
• Reduction in crawl rate
• Ability to get new pages indexed is reduced
• Not ranking for your own domain name
• Interlinked domains suffer the same consequences
• Seen in common sectors
• Decrease is sudden, if not over night
• Google’s site:, link:, and data in webmaster tools stays the same
• No warning or letter from Google

Basically what we have here is that the site was ranking falsely before based on an improper link profile, now that the link profile has been updated the symptoms above appear. You can’t be reconsidered because in order to restore the rankings they’d have to give you credit for the links, which isn’t going to happen. The one key anecdotal piece evidence here is a drop in ranking for the domain name, which generally returns eventually. Google has indicated that a drop in ranking for a domain name is a sign of penalty, however if it returns eventually I believe it points to another cause. Most worthless link directories link to sites with the domain name as the anchor text, which is quite unnatural in today’s linking. It may have been all the rave back in 1996 when people actually did build link lists for humans but not anymore, even news services use keyword anchor text to help add to the story. When Google has figured out that a majority of your links came from directories and link exchanges and removes the credit, the domain ranking suffers because a key indicator, anchor text, has been removed. Eventually relevancy will win over and the site will rank again for the domain. Just like a newly launched site will skyrocket to the top with a few good links because Google wants to keep its index fresh with the latest trends, the same goes for the reverse. When a site looses a large percentage of links all of a sudden it follows that it should also be reduced in rank. These behaviors happen naturally in the wild, a new site splashes onto the scene and goes viral in days, or an old site shuts its doors or gets involved in a scandal causing people to no longer link to it. Aggressive false link building mimics that natural quick link growth actual popular sites enjoy catapulting it to the top, but even more aggressive filtering by Google also mimics a drop in popularity.

How can you recover? Surely not through the same methods that got the site into this mess to begin with. More aggressive link building in crap directories and link exchanges on ‘links.html’ pages surely won’t help and may even aggravate the situation with another round of deranking. Reconsideration Requests will go unanswered as there is nothing to reconsider just a low linked site ranking where it should. The only answer is to build links naturally at a pace the site deserves and if the content is so poor that it won’t get links no matter who you show it to, it may be time to start over.

I have no insight whether or not this is manual or automated but I tend to think its manual as the quickness of the onset of the penalty suggests. An automated method would slowly remove such links as they are found, whereas a manual review of a sites link profile would tend to be quick and a one-time event. I think this penalty may have other aberrations such as “going supplemental”, “the minus (insert number of the day here) penalty”, or even some of the recent uproar over paid links.

I don’t want to give the impression that I believe the bad links to the site are actually harming anything, just that they used to count for something and no longer do. So before you go out and sign up your competitor for a million bestlittlewebsitedirectoryintheworld.com links remember that they may enjoy that unnatural bump for a while, and with the extra traffic actually get a few real links.

Okay, still testing something out.  Meanwhile, in my feeds I notice that Danny Sullivan let it slip what a big fan of my site is, odd since I thought I had really pi$$ed him off on Sphinn.

The Google Webmaster Help Group which I participate in has been inundated with spam lately from a certain spammer looking to push the 2008 Peking Olympic Games Souvenirs.

As seen below”

You will notice that the group’s CMS nofollows all links in a post which would make you wonder, “why would someone go to so much effort to bother spamming the groups?”

The answer is: Because it works. Well. Very well.

More and more people have been complaining lately that after discussing their site in GWHG that the thread will outrank their own site. Of course some of the sites discussed in the group are indeed penalized and just about anything will outrank it, but it has been noted the groups are getting more visible in the SERPS lately. The fact is that Groups material is indexed quickly and ranks quite well, irregardless regardless of content or value. Another aspect working for the Google Groups Spammer is the fact that Google has the groups in many languages all on their own TLD, in essence replicating their spam on many more URLs than just the one they planted it on.

The spammer may not be getting any link love from the Google Groups spam pointing to 200836.com but for his keyword phrase, “Peking 2008 Olympic Games”, he’s doing remarkably well in Google.

In the first 100 results Google Groups spam occupies 23 positions (screenshot). To be fair to Google, they aren’t the only target of this spammer as some Yahoo! groups and other forums are also spammed, for a total of 40 of the top results (screenshot). By any standard 40% of a search result being spam drops is not good.

With this Minty Fresh Spamdexing the spammers no longer have to worry about the links they generate but rather use the forums themselves as doorways to their spam site, which by the way is indexed.

A little housekeeping note here. I find that I am also interested in what other people have said on sites I visit such as Search Engine Rountable and Sphinn. I like having to not have to click through all of the articles to see what readers have recently added. To that end I’ve added my own page with the 40 latest comments and a sizable snippet. I’ll have to do some formatting changes to the page as it’s just a call to a simple sidebar widget right now but the basic data is available now.  Besides I had to see what February 29th looked like in this post.

Google’s Webmaster Help used to say:

What can I do if I’m afraid my competitor is harming my ranking in Google?

There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question.

Located at: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34449&topic=8524

That page now offers up a 404.

I noticed this a couple weeks ago and have been watching it, but it appears to be permanent. It’s possible that they just moved it renamed URLs, so I did some searching for keywords in the old help topic:

1. Harming
2. Harm
3. Competitor

None of those searches return anything that resembles the old statement.I haven’t heard anything official on this and am quite nervous about speculating that it’s a de facto way of acknowledging that a competitor can indeed harm you, for example buying tons of spammy paid links and reporting the site. Just because a speed limit sign was there last week and isn’t now doesn’t mean that you can go as fast as you’d like.

I find it kind of odd…

Update:  Hat tip to Barry Schwartz for pointing out that the statement is still available here. ( Screenshot )

There are million of various theories out there about how to find out if your site is penalized by Google. I thought I’d recap what Google officially says, and by officially I mean on their domain and bearing their brand. Their help system is a bit scattered so I may have missed some.

1. Verify that your site ranks for your domain name (reference)

Do a Google search for www.[yourdomain].com. If your site doesn’t appear in the results, or if it ranks poorly in the results, this is a sign that your site may be penalized for violations of the webmaster guidelines.

Brian White of Google notes that inside Google the nomenclature with the brackets used above indicates what is actually typed in the search box. So when they say to search for www.[yourdomain].com, they actually mean that you would search for yourdomain and not include the www, com, or the surrounding dots.

2. Message Center (reference 1, reference 2)

If we find certain problems with your site - for example, malware - we’ll let you know via the Message Center

we launched Message Center in our webmaster console, which allows us to send messages to verified site owners.

3. PageRank of Zero (reference 1, reference 2)

Google believes the site violates our Webmaster Quality Guidelines.

4. Removed from the index (reference 1 , reference 2 , there are more but you get the point)

If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.

and

if our review indicated that you engaged in deceptive practices and your site has been removed from our search results

5. Noted on your Summary Page (reference)

Your page has been blocked from our index because it does not meet the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We cannot comment on the individual reasons your page was removed. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index.

Note: Emails from Google were stopped in August 2007 due to spoofers and scammers.

I’ve seen quite a few people in Google’s webmaster help group ask how to verify their site for webmaster tools when using a Googlepages website. I took a cursory look and couldn’t find any online documentation so I tried it myself. The procedure I used is outlined below with screen shots. There may be a better way out there, but I know this one works.

1. First sign into Webmaster Tools and go to the dashboard where you will see a box to add your site. Type in your googlepages sites name here, just mysite.googlepages.com, with no ‘/home’ or any other subfolders or file names.

2. You’ll then be prompted with a link as the next step to verify your site, click that.

3. They will then ask you for a method to verify with a pull down that says, “choose verification method…” You’ll want to select the “Upload HTML File” Method.

4. After you’ve chosen your method, the next screen will show you a file name. This is the file you will need to create to upload to your Googlepages site. I just highlighted the file name, opened up my text editor application (in my case its notepad), then picked ’save as’, when prompted for the name I pasted the file name that Google gave me, and hit save. The file can be blank like that, as Google is only going to look for its existence, not what’s in it.

5. In another tab or another browser session open up your Googlepages account, and under your site manager, to the right you’ll see a box appropriately name “uploaded stuff.” Select the link [upload] (if you have files there already) or select the ‘browse’ button. You’ll then need to browse to the location of the file you saved in the previous step.

6. The final step is to go back to your Webmaster Tools account and click the ‘verify’ button. The response should be almost instant where you will see the verified screen. Now go and enjoy all the benefits that being a verified owner of a site offers you.

I’ve gone over adding a domain wide 301 redirects before in IIS to fix the www and non-www canonicalization issues, but the same issue also comes up for individual pages as well.

For an old page that is a .asp page adding the following code to the top of the page will perform the redirect. You can get rid of all other content on the page, as no browser or crawler will see it once they receive the 301 redirect.


<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", " http://www.example.com/newpage.asp"
Response.End
%>

That only works for pages with extensions set up to parse the asp code. A lot of times, specially on shared hosting environments, other pages with static extensions such as .html, .pdf, .txt, etc will not execute the code. With a little trickery we can accomplish that as well.

Let’s say you have the old file that you want to 301 redirect, for example:

www.example.com/old_directory/oldpage.html

Which you’d like to redirect to the new location:

www.example.com/new_directory/newpage.html

If you were to add the above code to newpage.html nothing would happen, or even the code would show up as text on the page, as more than likely your server is not set up to execute the code. Here’s what you can do:

1. Delete (or rename it to save it for a rollback) the oldpage.html file located in /old_directory/
2. Create a new sub-folder (note: it’s a folder not a file) under /old_directory/ with the same name as the file you just deleted, in this example you’d create a sub-folder named ‘oldpage.html’ like /old_directory/oldpage.html/.
3. In that folder you just created you will then create a default asp file to execute the redirect code, this can be different depending on how your site is set up, but generally it is default.asp, such as you now have a page located at /old_directory/oldpage.html/default.asp
4. in that default.asp you will want to add the following code:


<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", " http://www.example.com/new_directory/newpage.html"
Response.End
%>

That’s it you’re done. Now when someone or a crawler visits the old page, they will be 301 redirected to the new location. As stated before this also works for other static pages such as .PDF, .DOC, .TXT, .HTM , etc.

For example if you visit this page, which appears like it was a PDF:

www.hvac-direct.com/pdfs/oldfile.pdf

You should be automatically redirected to a new html file in a folder:

http://www.hvac-direct.com/html-version/

To see that is actually a 301 redirect view the response on the oyoy.eu tools. Note: that it’s a double redirect because of the lack of trailing slash on that server set-up, but it’s better than returning a 404!