JLH Design

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!

John Mueller of Google has officially stated to not worry about keywords meta tags:

Don’t bother with keyword meta tags. They are a relic and best left ignored. Why not spend your time writing more unique and compelling content for your users or improving the features on your site.

Let’s finally put this issue to bed and move on from here.

Thank you John.

For information on exactly what Meta Tags Google uses and how, here is a fine piece of documentation to read.

The one’s they list are:

<meta name="description" content="A description of the page" />
<title>The Title of the Page</title> **
<meta name="robots" content="..., ..." />
<meta name="googlebot" content="..., ..." />
<meta name="google" value="notranslate" />
<meta name="verify-v1" content="..." />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="...; charset=..." />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="...;url=..." />

** Yes, I know it’s not a meta tag.

UPDATE 2/1/08:

The original subdomain is now gone from the results, but more have been created and they’ve yet to fix that hole. Barry Schwartz noticed the thread as well and added his own take.

Take a look at the 25,000 plus pages and the one specifically mentioned in the Groups thread. You must have javascript turned off to view the spammy pages and have it turned on to be redirected to the target of the spam.

Saved Screenshot

Not that this is the first time a Google domain has hosted spam, but this appears like a systematic hack rather than the work of millions of uncoordinated efforts.

I filled out a spam report in webmaster tools, we’ll see how long it hangs around. After cleaning up their site I suggest Larry and Sergey visit this page to learn how to file a reconsideration request.

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’ve been touting the virtues of Google’s Webmaster Help Group for some time now, real people with real sites get valuable help daily. Google has put forth some guidelines for using the group but I thought I’d amend them with some of my personal opinions. If you want to get as much out of the help group as possible the following ideas gripes (in no particular order) will help you to help us help you.

Read the FAQ - Google likes to hide the FAQ and group charter by only linking to it ten times [yes 10!] on the home page so they are sometimes tough to notice, but it’s really helpful if you read the frequently asked questions as since they are frequently asked that means that frequently you will find your answer right there. I’ve highlighted the links in the thumbnail as they are pretty well hidden on the page.

Apparently 10 links isn’t always enough so here’s ELEVEN.

1. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
2. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
3. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
4. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
5. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
6. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
7. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
8. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
9. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
10. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
11. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read

Post Site Name - this is stated in the in the group charter:

Please include all relevant details in your post, including your site URL, any error messages you see, etc.
Also, make sure to use descriptive subject lines for your posts. All of this will enable other group members to help you more quickly and it will also enable us to troubleshoot issues internally.

I cannot emphasize this enough. This is a practical place where real sites are looked at if you’d like to practice theoretical webmastering or SEO then I’d head over to Webmaster World where you can talk about “totally-white-hat-hand-written-red-widgets-authority-sites” all day and night. The regulars in the webmaster help group have looked at thousands of sites and are aware of most trends in sites’ performance problems in Google. Most can be deciphered in a few minutes but others take a lot of digging, which requires the site be physically examined.

If you are worried about the site being found in the search results on Groups there are a couple things you can do. The easiest is to post the URL in your profile, those don’t get indexed. The 2nd method is to obfuscate it a bit by breaking the link (don’t use http:// or www before it). The regulars in the group are quite willing to work with you as well, so stating that you don’t want links to the site placed within the thread will usually keep everyone in line.

Be patient - The help group is manned mostly by volunteers. Paid employees of Google do lurk the group and occasionally post but not nearly as much as the volunteers. If you’ve come expecting an answer in 10 minutes, well, it’s not that kind of party. Bumping threads is frowned upon and most likely will get the post ignored more than moved up. Also remember that this is an international forum with people from all corners of the earth posting, so while it may be 2:00 pm in your neck of the woods the foremost expert on subject may be in bed. Giving it at least a 24 hour cycle.

Spare us the Tales of Woe - We’ve seen it all, lost homes, laying off employees, starving babies, turning off the heat, etc. Granted your site is important to you, just like our sites are important to us. Trying to rally the troops by telling a sob story about how Google has ruined your marriage is not going to win the hearts and minds of the people who have devoted thousands of hours working to support Googles search quality.

Be prepared to back it up with facts - “I’ve been penalized”  or I’ve got the “-30/-950/-50/+6/Duplicate Content Penalty” may fly in some forums but as I said earlier GWHG is a practical place, we need real life examples. Explain how you came to the conclusion, what evidence you have, and what trends you see. “I’ve lost all my rankings” doesn’t help anyone help you as we don’t know what you used to rank for.

Be specific - Asking, “How can I improve my site in Google” isn’t going to get much response, it’s not the free SEO forum, but rather the Google Webmaster Help Group. Ask specific questions with regards to Google and you are likely receive some very specific answers.

Don’t start multiple threads - The regulars will be quick to point out that you are asking the same question over and over, thus souring other regulars from even bothering with your question.

Engage in discussion - Please come back and let us all know if you headed the advice, if it worked, didn’t work, or you just ignored it. Asking follow up questions to the follow ups is likely to get you more information, and threads with larger numbers of responses definitely get more attention.

Include History - So much of what happens in Google is not what you did yesterday but what you did three months ago, so if you recently bought the domain and 301 redirected it 7 times, changed hosts,  got rid of the malware downloads in hidden links, and removed the 17,000 hidden words before asking for assistance it would be good to bring that up.

There isn’t a way to contact Google - Again covered in the FAQ that nobody reads, but this is the simple truth.  There is not an email address for you to discuss why your site doesn’t rank for your keyword.

More than likely we are all you are going to get - Ranting and raving and demanding a 100% accurate answer from Larry Page is likely not to get you anywhere and even less likely to get an answer from 2nd or 3rd in command like Susan or JohnMu.

Be Honest - Nothing makes people angry quite as much as finding out we were deceived.  If you own a few hundred spam sites all interlinked and pointing to the cash cow that just took a tumble in the rankings you may want to mention that this isn’t your first rodeo, as someone will likely figure that out and the response will be a lot more brutal than if you pointed it out in the beginning.

Look for the Magic Phrase - Find the Easter Egg in the FAQs, more likely to attract Googlers.

Be polite, respectful, and keep it clean - While the group is pretty good at brutal honesty, brutality is not tolerated at any level.  Google’s response is swift and decisive and the regulars will swoop in and quickly surround abusive posters.