JLH Design Blog

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.

I’m no stranger to Google’s reconsideration request. I’ve helped dozens if not hundreds of people scour their sites, identify possible violations, implement changes, and compose the reconsideration request. I don’t do this as a professional cause but as an extension of my efforts in helping webmasters in Google’s Webmaster Help Group. Perhaps its because I choose the sites I want to work with and only cater to the ones that I believe are acting in ignorance rather than more devious intentions, but my success rate is quite high. There’s never been a case I couldn’t solve, then again this is probably due to my selective choices and not my mad Google skills. Either way, I know of what I speak.

Which brings me to an interesting situation that I was alerted of in twitter, saw in Sphinn, and then saw unfold on Dazzlin Donna’s take on SEO news, tips and theories SEO Scoop Blog. If you take the time to read Donna’s post you’ll see that she was caught up in the paid links dragnet and lost some of her visible PageRank. After a while she decided to demonetize her blog and set it up to comply with Google’s guidelines regarding paid links. She’s not Yahoo! so her time and opinion in choosing which sites to review are not worthy of being compensated for if they contain an active link (Google’s opinion, not mine).  After cleaning up the site she submitted a reconsideration request to Google.  Time passed and yet her PageRank penalty persisted.  Five weeks passed and she has finally found some resolution, though not through Google’s reconsideration request, but through the only solution that will actually work.

From my outsiders point of view and without any inside knowledge, the situation unfolded like this.

1. Sometime in late December a reconsideration request was filed.
2. Five weeks passed…
3. Donna posts her plight to her blog
4. A twitter is sent out.
5. The post is Sphunn.
6. 20 people sphunn it.
7. The Sphinn goes hot 2 hours later.
8. Matt Cutts comments on her blog, scolding her for her non-scalable method of approaching the situation, but offers to help.
9. Matt offers to look into another commenter’s site.
10. Matt says that her disclosure policy could be the problem.
11. Donna changes her policy and responds that she did so.
12. Matt emails the Google employee charged with reviewing Donna’s request.  Apparently there is another post that is still passing PageRank that was paid for.
13. Donna fixes the post and comments that she did so.
14. Matt points out another violation.
15. Donna fixes that violation.
16. Matt praises his team and says that they will get to it soon.

I would not have thought of how obtuse this whole process was had it not been for Matt saying, “In general you want to go with the reconsideration request approach rather than invoking me (that’s not scalable :)”  [my emphasis] Obviously this process is not scalable at all.  Here we have someone who’s worked on fixing her site, made some substantial changes, submitted a request for review, and apparently missed some things.  What she missed was exactly the same problem that she already admitted guilt to in the reconsideration request, but rather than offering any help Google files the request in the circular file and ignores the problem.

Since the majority of site owners don’t know Matt Cutts, know how to use social sites to get attention to their blog, don’t have blogs for that matter, and if they did probably wouldn’t get Matt to write six comments on their blog and send an email on their behalf, this is not a scalable solution.

A scalable solution would be the following:

1. Site owner fixes site and submits a reconsideration request.
2. Google reviews the site and finds some outstanding violations.
3. Google sends a message back in the site owners  webmaster’s tools message center saying, “We have received and reviewed your request for consideration.  Unfortunately at this time we are unable to act on your request due to continued possible violations of our Webmaster Guidelines.  Please feel free to review the Webmaster’s Guidelines, make any changes that you find appropriate and resubmit your reconsideration request”
4. Site owner digs deeper and sends in request.
5. Google responds with another note, “We have received and reviewed your request for consideration.  It appears that your site is now within our guidelines.”

Notice that I didn’t even say that Google had to specifically say what violation they had.  I didn’t even specify whether or not a penalty has ever existed or has been lifted.  What I did do is “COMMUNICATE“.   Letting the site owner at least know that they are being heard.  Google’s response can be an automated one with only two possibilities. I’m sure their is a radio button somewhere on a computer somewhere that a Google employee is clicking when they review a reconsideration request.  It wouldn’t be too much to program one of two auto-responses depending on the status of that button.  That would be a scalable solution.

Their communication efforts in the help groups and their webmasters blog have been quite admirable lately, but there still is a disjoint between your average webmasters and those who know how to get to Matt Cutts, and that is just not right.  Not right at all.  I’ve heard many people say and write that one thing you should look for on an SEO’s resume is whether or not they know any search engine engineers, this situation just adds  that, and that is just not right.  Not right at all.

Having Matt Cutts be the voice of Google out there writing on his own blog,  commenting on people’s sites, and occasionally penning something on the official webmaster’s blog is great and wonderful for the community that watches that sort of thing.  I just believe that those people are a small subset of the actual webmaster population and the majority should not be at a disadvantage because they don’t subscribe to the right feeds.

A thread was started on July 3, 2007 by the owner of a site who believes that Google has stopped indexing his/her site because:

About three weeks ago I turn[ed] a cookies feature on which would help to prevent abuse of the site. I believe this also cause all bots to stop crawling the site.

Google does mention that the use of cookies could be problematic, specially if it’s required to properly see the site.

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site

Had the cookies caused a problem it could have been diagnosed by using the Lynx browser.

That’s not why I am pointing out this thread.

Googler MattD steps in and points out some “old” pages of the site that contain a significant amount of hidden text (click link to view the hidden text). Noteworthy in this discussion is the fact that MattD went beyond normal protocol and provided site specific information. The danger of doing this is that everyone may expect this sort of person treatment, which isn’t feasible and is the wrong assumption, but it also is a great milestone and example that should be held up as model for others to learn from. From this example I drew the following opinions.

1. It’s good to have an idea of what you may have done to get in trouble, but don’t let that idea get in the way of other possibilities. Often having multiple people look at the site will get you differing views that you the owner who is often too close to the site and wouldn’t see as a problem.
2. We don’t know how MattD knew what the site was in trouble for, was it a manual review or a signal in some of their wonder tools? Either way they know. Remember Susan mentioned that a review of your site will probably include a deeper look at it’s over-all practices.
3. When submitting your reconsideration request you must be forthright and include ALL discretions, even the old ones specially the old ones. More than likely a ban or penalty is not from what you did last night but from a while ago, a review of the entire site is in order along with a recount of all the changes.
4. It is entirely possible that the site and or pages ranking was affected by the hidden text, after reconsideration the site may not regain its original position since that effect is now gone.
5. If you are penalized its because Google has decided that you were attempting to fool the search algorithm. If when you submit a reconsideration request that is incomplete and doesn’t include all problems, that could also be considered an attempt to deceive, though Adam Lasnik has said multiple reconsideration requests are not seen as a signal to be held against you. I wouldn’t assume that filing a 2nd or 3rd request would be aggregated with the previous one, more than likely a different person is reviewing it. If I were to submit an additional request with more information I’d include the previous statements as well
6. This is always a problem with a 3rd party looking at a site. We are not always given all of the information available, access to all of the sites pages on the server, or knowledge of what was done before. We only see the state the site is in now and without a context in which to put that in. Google on the other hand is the king of data storage and can contrast and compare multiple various previous incarnations.