JLH Design

Reid from Google Webmaster Help Group fame, search quality fortune, and Google glory offered some more answers to more webmaster questions. You can watch the video for his answers.

Even More Webmaster Questions

He answered an interesting question that’s been tested several times by several people but this is the first official mention I can recall.

….wanted to know if Google will follow links on a page using the “noindex” attribute in the “robots” meta tag. To answer this question, Googlebot will follow links on a page which uses the meta “noindex” tag, but that page will not appear in our search results…

What does that mean for you? Well if you’ve got nosy competitors wandering around your link profile as some like to do you can still feed links to a site but keep that page out of the index and away from prying eyes (besides of course through navigation and other lesser search engines). It’s an old trick now but a good one to keep in the arsenal, specially for initial feeder links.

I originally hinted at this in my Don’t Use Robots.txt to Control Indexing post.

A follow up question I’d have is whether or not pages that are not indexed and blocked from being so have to conform to webmaster guidelines or does the site pay a price for having non-conforming pages that are not indexed?  I’ll leave it to the reader to think of the loopholes that exist for either possible answer to that question.

It seems a day doesn’t go by in GWHG that someone is concerned that some page that they blocked in their robots.txt file is showing up in Google. Google’s handling of the robots.txt is quite elaborate, well documented, and easily tested. Having said all of that many do not fully understand the intent of robots.txt and how the opportunity to use it for optimization of a web site.

Any discussion of robots.txt cannot be complete without the caveat that only GOOD robots follow it and it’s a very public file, so don’t expect it to keep out rouge bots or as a security measure to keep stuff hidden. That being said, I’d like to talk about an obedient bot, googlebot.

As elaborate or simple as your robots.txt may be it accomplishes one thing it directs the crawler where it can and cannot go explicitly by disallowing some pages/folders or indirectly by only allowing certain pages and blocking others. Stopping the crawler from crawling a page should not be confused with giving it direction on what to do with that page. As a matter of fact Google will indeed index urls that explicitly blocked by the robots.txt file. Since they cannot crawl them they really don’t know what’s on the page so the URL will often be listed as URL only without a Title or description (snippet). Sometimes if they can find the information elsewhere like the ODP they’ll use that to help fill in the blanks.

I don’t know exactly what threshold exists for the decision to include a URL that’s blocked by robots.txt but I’d imagine as with anything Google it has something to do with the quantity and quality of links pointing to it. That being said, and as anyone who’s trying to rank something in Google knows, those links are gold and not to be taken too lightly. Most honest-to-goodness real links start out in someones browser bar. They’ve navigated to a page and found it interesting enough to tell others about it by cutting-n-pasting the URL into some sort of HTML somewhere. It would be a crying shame if Google were to follow that link only to be blocked by a robots.txt and not be able to transfer any value to the site other than to list the URL as URL-only in the search results, which will more than likely only ever be shown for a search on the anchor text, which may actually only be “click here“.

Say Matt Cutts really wants to rip into me with one of his famous debunking posts. In part of his article he really wants to show how often I speak of Google on this blog. To emphasis that fact he may link to an internal site search page like: http://www.jlh-design.com/?s=google which will find all the posts here that use the word Google. Being a good webmaster I don’t want Google to return my search results in their search results as we’ve been warned not to.

I could block all search results from being crawled in my robots.txt with something like this:

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User-agent: *
Disallow: /?s=*

Which will keep Google from crawling that URL. However a link from Matt Cutts is prized and rare so I may want to take advantage of it when it does come around.

The better option is to allow the URL to be crawled but stop Google from indexing it via a robots meta tag.

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<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow,noodp,noydir" />

The page that Matt linked to does contain all of my site’s navigation pointing to previous posts, the home page, categories etc, that I’d like indexed and ranked. Allowing Google to crawl the page and follow the links while stopping it from being indexed accomplishes the goal of keeping it out of the index but passing value to the site as a whole.

For a fine example of this in the wild let’s take a renowned SEO site SEOmoz who has this in their robots.txt file.

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User-agent: *
Disallow: /ugc/category/

Yet Google has 28 URL-only pages indexed currently. (screenshot)

So remember that robots.txt doesn’t stop a page from being indexed it does however stop the page from passing any value to your site if they can’t crawl it. Using the robots noindex meta tag will control indexing but allow crawling for discovery of other links on the page.

I’ve been flattered with interviews, received recognition on Google’s webmaster blog, mentioned on industry leading sites like Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land, linked to by Matt Cutts, and even made the BigList.

But Today I have I arrived. My fame is now official.

I have an insane cyber-stalker.

Please, I beg you, please, go read my #1 fans’ site by John H. Gohde (screenshot). Apparently somewhere he got the impression that I was an SEO. Okay, so he doesn’t have his facts straight, but it makes for good comedy. He spends most of his day searching for [JLH] on Google to see where I rank. I never knew of my desire to rank for JLH until this very moment when I was trying to follow his posts.

I don’t know this guy from Adam other than he was one of a very few banned from Google groups for being abusive to people. I see he’s on Sphinn now, I expect the mods there will have their hands full once he settles in and starts rambling and attacking people.

If they’re shooting at you, you know you’re doing something right. (The West Wing - the Midterms)

I can’t think of someone I’d rather not like me in the online world more than someone who manages to get themselves banned from both Google Groups and Wikipedia. That puts me with some good company.

In their ever vigilant zeal to be perplexing and clear as mud on the issue Google has many stances on the paid links situation.

Some official:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Some not so official:

We’ll be concentrating primarily on the sellers, but if you send us a site that appears to be buying links that pass PageRank it’s trivial for us to look up all the backlinks for that site to find potential sellers and work from there.

Whether or not they are “concentrating” on link buyers or not, it appears through many threads on Google Webmasters Help Group that people are actually being penalized for buying links. The ones I’ve seen have been pretty obvious either through sponsored themes, automated link networks, or the most obvious sitewide footer links.

They do offer a method for buying links without getting in Google-hot-water with the much maligned and oft misapplied rel=”nofollow” link or through a robots.txt block:

Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Which is a all well and good if you are running the site and have control over the links. But what if you are buying the links? What Google is failing to recognize is that sometimes people may actually buy links because they want the traffic. Gasp. It is possible that a permanent link purchased for a set price will in the long run cost less per click than… let’s say… an adwords ad.

I haven’t mentioned the negative SEO aspect yet, as I’m not convinced that it’s really a viable method, but it is often discussed. If Google is penalizing sites that buy links generally the next thought in the room is “Then I’ll just buy my competition a bunch of links and report them!”. First off I’m not 100% convinced they actually penalize the buying sites but rather just discount the links from the sites that sold them, which if the case you are just paying money for clicks to your competition. Not generally a good business practice. Second, I’m not sure they’ll react to all of the reports so you may in fact be buying them some links that will help them in the rankings PLUS the clicks, also not a sustainable plan. Either way there are a fair amount of webmasters out there worrying that someone else can buy links to their site and have it hurt them.

With all this in mind, the desire to buy links (that you cannot control the format of) for traffic and the logical concern that someone else could buy links to your site that may hurt you I propose that Google institutes a “Report My Paid Links” or “Disavow Links” feature in Webmaster Tools.

I envision this tool to allow a webmaster to list domains or pages that have linked to their verified domain that they do not want to count for or against them in ranking. It’s a way for a webmaster to say that they’ve purchased links for traffic in a local directory or perhaps a high profile school newspaper but don’t want to give the impression that those links were purchased for PageRank manipulation. It would have the added benefit of letting a webmaster feel more at ease if they see some spammy links pointing to their site that they may want to disavow. Oh, perhaps the old idea that there is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm you still applies and those links won’t actually hurt you, but it would be a good thing to help put them at ease.

So I say: Google, please let me report paid links! Let me tell you which links I bought for traffic. Let me tell you so that if somebody reports my site as a link buyer you can see that I already told you about them, increasing your trust in me rather than taking the chance that some human reviewer gets it wrong. Let me have those links on record in case the link I bought which was on a nofollow page is changed later by the webmaster without my knowledge.

Then again if you are only going to punish the sellers and not the buyers, then say so, so we can put all this “Google bowling” non-sense behind us.

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.

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 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.

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.

I was reading Sebastian’s latest rant about a scraper and spammer named Veronica Domb so I followed his link to the scraper site. Other than it being a complete copy of one of Sebastian’s posts, I saw a little button saying that the scraper blog was worth $10,161.72!

Since I actually write the stuff on my blog and not just republish feeds I thought I’d see what this little button thinks of me.

My blog is worth $38,388.72.
How much is your blog worth?

What load of crap!

Besides being totally inaccurate, it does auto-magically create a bunch of links to the button author, which I don’t appreciate. Those links would explain why his site is worth $6,220,101.72 (in its flawed opinion). The only thing consistent with that calculation is that all the values end in 0.72. So if anyone would like to buy me a beer for $38,388.72 I’ll transfer the domain, export the databases, zip the server contents, and email it all to you in about 30 seconds. We’ll be having steak that night.

Oh yeah, did I mention Veronica Domb yet?

I found an interview with Matt Cutts on Sphinn that I found quite revealing. Normally these types of interviews are very bland and boring where the interviewer gets to build up some sort of street-cred by getting a big name search rock star to talk, and the interviewee gets to spew the normal company spin. This one was a bit different, at least in the fact that I took from it some pearls that can be used in forums to dispel frequently addressed concerns.

Leaving the obligatory social interaction out of it, the highlights of the interview as I see fit are as follows:

1. Syndicating Content - When syndicating content to be published on multiple sources be sure to include a link within the content to the original source of the content. This will help transfer PageRank the syndicated content may get from external links to the original source. When Google is deciding what story to return in the results when there are many copies they apparently, ” a lot of the times it helps to know which one came first; which one has higher PageRank” On the other side of the story, if you are stealing syndicating content and want it to rank higher than the original then don’t include a link to the original source and get more PageRank to yours than theirs.
2. Supplemental Results - There are a couple of undocumented methods for finding your supplemental page count still working. At least one data center is now actually searching the supplemental black hole for 100% of it’s queries, with, “hopefully at more in the future”
3. Link Quality - “a link is a link, is a link; wherever that link’s worth is, that is the worth that we give it” .edu links do not count more than a .com link based on any specific weighting in the ranking algorithm. It just happens that many .edu links are naturally better than your average easy to get .com link. Additionally social bookmarking links follow the same guidelines and are not devalued based on their social network status, if they are weak they are weak on their own, without any help from a calculation.
4. Link Count - The old adage of 100 links per page is a bit outdated and a good example is DHTML throwout menus when many links could be seen on one page. Matt notes that a page with 5000 links would have it’s PageRank so diluted when it came to distribution that the links wouldn’t pass much. The question I think wasn’t answered here was in regards to the DHTML menu structure is that navigation like that tends to be site wide and Google is quite good at determining what part of pages is the template or site wide stuff, vs the actual content. My question would then be is PageRank flow just a simple division of PageRank by link count, or does more weighting go to the actual page content and less to sitewide navigation. Obviously a page with 1000 links (like a sitemap) isn’t user friendly as the designer should have provided a logical tree for the user to find the information, rather than have to read 1000 links and figure it out for them selves. Bottom line is that 100 links per page isn’t a hard and fast number, but keeping it reasonable still applies.
5. NOFOLLOW passing anchor text - In it’s early days there were some rare, and bug-like, instances where the anchor text of a nofollowed link was used in the search results. Those bugs have been killed. Right now, “At least for Google, we have taken a very clear stance that those links are not even used for discovery; they are not used for PageRank; they are not used for anchor text in any way. Anybody can go and do various experiments to verify that.”
6. Predatory Link Buying - Buying links for your competitor in hopes of hurting them is more than likely going to help them as Google is most attacking the link sellers. Kind of goes without saying, but I bring it up only because the original Webmaster Guidelines on the issue only addressed buyers and not sellers.

There’s a lot more in the interview.

Earlier tonight I left a comment on Sphinn, “This is all becoming borderline Sisyphean,” regarding the debate that has permeated the SEO crowd.  I’ve looked for uproar beyond the professional search engine manipulation machine and just cannot find any.  Anyway I find the whole fiasco quite humorous to witness.  I have opinions on the matter, but none that are going to make a difference.

Avoiding the obvious wiki reference I found this definition to help clarify my position:

Of or relating to an endless and ineffective task.
This one comes straight out of Greek myth. Sisyphus was a king of Corinth, a son of Aeolus (the ruler of the winds, hence our word aeolian for something produced by or borne on the wind). In later legend he was the father of Odysseus or Ulysses. His name actually meant “crafty” in Greek: he was noted for his deception and he’s the equivalent in Greek folklore of the master trickster who turns up in many folk beliefs, such as Coyote in American Indian mythology. He even managed to cheat Death the first time around, surviving the experience to live to a ripe old age. In Greek legend Sisyphus was punished in Hades for his misdeeds in life by being condemned eternally to roll a heavy stone up a hill. As he neared the top, the stone rolled down again, so that his labor was everlasting and futile. The word first appeared in English in the middle of the seventeenth century. It isn’t used much these days because so few people understand the reference to classical literature.

The parallels that one can draw from that story are uncanny.  It also answers the question, beyond the obvious “not to help the spammers angle” why Google doesn’t notify everyone of their penalties, their cause, their existence, nor their cure.  The announcements of paid links have accomplished the same task, paralyzing the community in an endless and ineffective task of one-sided debate.

This was found today on the Google Webmaster Help Group. A site which is selling it’s SEO services is banned/removed from Google’s indexed. When pushed the poster admits that he doesn’t really know any SEO and is just “outsourcing” the services. Apparently he’s got a few of these sites or at least has scraped some, all with the fine keyword stuffed bottom navigation (classic), clip art images, no external links, you name it.

I don’t want to out the guy as he’s got plenty of troubles all ready, but this is just classic. From the FAQ of the site:

Why is [site name] not ranked high on the search engines?

[site name] web site is intentionally not optimized for search engines because our services are for companies needing high traffic exposure and awareness. The less traffic we receive the better because we focus on qualified and selected clients that will actually benefit from High Rank optimization.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

In what many are calling just a warning volley across the bow of many link-selling sites Google has initiated a penalty of sorts by reducing some sites’ visual PageRank score, one such site is Search Engine Roundtable which provides us proof that their rankings and traffic have not been affected.

Clearly a reduction in PageRank for a site selling links is a signal that Google feels that they are breaking the rules as written in the webmaster guidelines. Regarding link selling they state,

Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Which is a practice that Search Engine Roundtable is not ready to take part in as made evident by Barry Schwartz (rustybrick) in the above linked article,

On a personal note, I trust my sponsors, I value their sponsorships and I couldn’t do what I do without their financial support. Some sponsors can’t afford huge sponsorships, so they sponsor in their ways. It is what enables this site and many other sites to function and operate on a daily basis. I turn down sponsors all the time because they are simply not relevant or useful to my reader. I hand select them and for them to be on my site, means I trust them. Why nofollow someone you trust and want to thank? Is that a slap in their face? Will I have to and will they continue to sponsor? Time will tell.

So we have a site that outwardly sells links, does not want to conform to the webmaster guidelines by marking paid links in the manner in which Google desires, and has been hit with a PageRank reduction. Clearly a signal that the site could be considered not only a rule breaker but a bad neighborhood to be associated with.

In Google’s webmaster’s guidelines it clearly states,

In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

I’ve written before on the difficulties of discerning (complete with Matt Cutts’ email address!) what a bad neighborhood is even asked for clarification on the matter.

I find it quite ironic then that Google’s very own official blog links to said site which has admittedly broken the rules and publicly been admonished. ( screen shot ) Are they not taking their own advice and linking to a bad neighborhood? This is not the first time Google has talked out of both sides of their mouth. Even during this last wave of anti-link-selling assaults the largest link seller in the land has gotten off scot-free with out any sort of PageRank deduction. Matt Cutts has even come out and said that they are allowed to sell links because they review the links before they publish them and not every one makes it into the directory. If that is the standard to be followed perhaps Barry Schwartz and others like him to accept advertising dollars should just charge for the chance of being listed on his site, add an element of uncertainty to the equation. Maybe then he will get his PageRank back while making more money as he could oversell the advertisements 10 fold. To me that seems highly unethical but for some reason is the only method of linking endorsed by Google without the use of machine only readable declaration of a paid link.

If reducing one’s PageRank for selling links is really a penalty, I would expect Google to do the right thing for their own blogs ranking and not link to such terribly bad neighborhoods (t.i.c.) and will be watching the site as an indicator.

Before anyone get’s upset at me, I’m not calling Barry Schwartz a spammer or even personally think he did anything wrong. The PageRank degrading has been widely published and I am just drawing the connection between what Google says and what they do. I follow Barry on Twitter, his own Cartoon Barry, Search Engine Roundtable, and his contributions on Search Engine Land. He is considered a leader in the industry sector and I value his opinions and expertise.  There’s at least 4 links in this article to his properties that are genuine followed editorial links of endorsement, not like the link to the Yahoo! directory which is nofollowed due to their blatant breaking of the rules.