Saturday, December 01, 2007 at 12:02 PM
Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results. We enjoy working with webmasters, and an added benefit of our working together is that when you make better and more accessible content, the internet, as well as our index, improves. This in turn allows us to deliver more relevant search results to users.
If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines. Such links can hurt relevance by causing:
- Inaccuracies: False popularity and links that are not fundamentally based on merit, relevance, or authority
- Inequities: Unfair advantage in our organic search results to websites with the biggest pocketbooks
In order to stay within Google's quality guidelines, paid links should be disclosed through a rel="nofollow" or other techniques such as doing a redirect through a page which is robots.txt'ed out. Here's more information explaining our stance on buying and selling links that pass PageRank:
February 2003: Google's official quality guidelines have advised "Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank" for several years.
September 2005: I posted on my blog about text links and PageRank.
December 2005: Another post on my blog discussed this issue, and said
Many people who work on ranking at search engines think that selling links can lower the quality of links on the web. If you want to buy or sell a link purely for visitors or traffic and not for search engines, a simple method exists to do so (the nofollow attribute). Google’s stance on selling links is pretty clear and we’re pretty accurate at spotting them, both algorithmically and manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines.
September 2006: In an interview with John Battelle, I noted that "Google does consider it a violation of our quality guidelines to sell links that affect search engines."
January 2007: I posted on my blog to remind people that "links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines."
April 2007: We provided a mechanism for people to report paid links to Google.
June 2007: I addressed paid links in my keynote discussion during the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference in Seattle. Here's a video excerpt from the keynote discussion. It's less than a minute long, but highlights that Google is willing to use both algorithmic and manual detection of paid links that violate our quality guidelines, and that we are willing to take stronger action on such links in the future.
June 2007: A post on the official Google Webmaster Blog noted that "Buying or selling links to manipulate results and deceive search engines violates our guidelines." The post also introduced a new official form in Google's webmaster console so that people could report buying or selling of links.
June 2007: Google added more specific guidance to our official webmaster documentation about how to report buying or selling links and what sort of link schemes violate our quality guidelines.
August 2007: I described Google's official position on buying and selling links in a panel dedicated to paid links at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose.
September 2007: In a post on my blog recapping the SES San Jose conference, I also made my presentation available to the general public (PowerPoint link).
October 2007: Google provided comments for a Forbes article titled "Google Purges the Payola".
October 2007: Google officially confirmed to Search Engine Land that we were taking stronger action on this issue, including decreasing the toolbar PageRank of sites selling links that pass PageRank.
October 2007: An email that I sent to Search Engine Journal also made it clear that Google was taking stronger action on buying/selling links that pass PageRank.
We appreciate the feedback that we've received on this issue. A few of the more prevalent questions:
Q: Is buying or selling links that pass PageRank a violation of Google's guidelines? Why?
A: Yes, it is, for the reasons we mentioned above. I also recently did a post on my personal blog that walks through an example of why search engines wouldn't want to count such links. On a serious medical subject (brain tumors), we highlighted people being paid to write about a brain tumor treatment when they hadn't been aware of the treatment before, and we saw several cases where people didn't do basic research (or even spellchecking!) before writing paid posts.
Q: Is this a Google-only issue?
A: No. All the major search engines have opposed buying and selling links that affect search engines. For the Forbes article Google Purges The Payola, Andy Greenberg asked other search engines about their policies, and the results were unanimous. From the story:
Search engines hate this kind of paid-for popularity. Google's Webmaster guidelines ban buying links just to pump search rankings. Other search engines including Ask, MSN, and Yahoo!, which mimic Google's link-based search rankings, also discourage buying and selling links.
Other engines have also commented about this individually, e.g. a search engine representative from Microsoft commented in a recent interview and said
The reality is that most paid links are a.) obviously not objective and b.) very often irrelevant. If you are asking about those then the answer is absolutely there is a risk. We will not tolerate bogus links that add little value to the user experience and are effectively trying to game the system.
Q: Is that why we've seen some sites that sell links receive lower PageRank in the Google toolbar?
A: Yes. If a site is selling links, that can affect our opinion about the value of that site or cause us to lose trust in that site.
Q: What recourse does a site owner have if their site was selling links that pass PageRank, and the site's PageRank in the Google toolbar was lowered?
A: The site owner can address the violations of the webmaster guidelines and submit a reconsideration request in Google's Webmaster Central console. Before doing a reconsideration request, please make sure that all sold links either do not pass PageRank or are removed.
Q: Is Google trying to tell webmasters how to run their own site?
A: No. We're giving advice to webmasters who want to do well in Google. As I said in this video from my keynote discussion in June 2007, webmasters are welcome to make their sites however they like, but Google in turn reserves the right to protect the quality and relevance of our index. To the best of our knowledge, all the major search engines have adopted similar positions.
Q: Is Google trying to crack down on other forms of advertisements used to drive traffic?
A: No, not at all. Our webmaster guidelines clearly state that you can use links as means to get targeted traffic. In fact, in the presentation I did in August 2007, I specifically called out several examples of non-Google advertising that are completely within our guidelines. We just want disclosure to search engines of paid links so that the paid links won't affect search engines.
Q: I'm aware of a site that appears to be buying/selling links. How can I get that information to Google?
A: Read our official blog post about how to report paid links from earlier in 2007. We've received thousands and thousands of reports in just a few months, but we welcome more reports. We appreciate the feedback, because it helps us take direct action as well as improve our existing algorithmic detection. We also use that data to train new algorithms for paid links that violate our quality guidelines.
Q: Can I get more information?
A: Sure. I wrote more answers about paid links earlier this year if you'd like to read them. And if you still have questions, you can join the discussion in our Webmaster Help Group.
192 comments:
What about sites that received the penalty by mistake?
I have 1 blog that has never bought or sold a link that was reduced to PR0. I'm hesitant to submit a re-inclusion request because it requires admission of wrongdoing. That blog has done nothing wrong and has no options.
YOU ARE NOT BEING FAIR in fact you are being stupid!!
Not all paid links are bad. You can not group all paid links under one banner. A Webmaster has every right to charge for a link when there is a competitive market to get a link on that page.
What you fail to understand is that there are just no opportunities for small Webmasters to get attention.
This is especially true of commercial sites. Occasionally a information or trivia site might make the Digg Homepage - but few people are going to help small Webmasters unless there is something in it for them.
Not all Webmasters can even THINK of competing with large organization who spend MILLIONS as if it was water.
The concern is not whether a links is paid but whether it is relevant.
You have an obligation to help the small Webmaster if you are going to insist that they not use paid links.
What other option are you giving them. Are they to just die and wither away.
On one of my web sites, I actively sell advertising to organizations in my regional niche. I now add the nofollow to those links. If I don't have an adbox sold for a certain time period, I use that space to link to one of my other web sites, in effect advertising my own sites. Is that bad/against the webmaster guidelines? No money is involved, since it is my own sites involved.
I'm another entirely unhappy webmaster. I write a blog and up until the recently, I had a PR of 2. Not an extremely high number but I was proud of it nonetheless. Come to find out I'm now a ZERO. I didn't do ANYTHING! I write occasionally for PayPerPost and I've been known to have the occasional Google AdSense ad embedded into my posts. I don't know why exactly I was penalized or what I did, but I am not happy. In fact, I'm furious. I even blogged about it.
I used to be a fan of Google, I used to LOVE Google. But now I can see that you're all just as bad and stingy and greedy and money-hungry as the assholes who are gouging us at the pumps. They raise our gas prices, you guys bitch and moan over a few measly dollars. Grow a pair, Google. Maybe it's time you realize that not all of us are wealthy billionaire CEOs, not all of us know how to make millions off of AdSense, and some of us really rely on that PR for a few extra bucks and I mean that literally... $5.00 here and there. It may not be much to you, but it means the world to one of my children when they get a happy meal with it.
I'm disgusted.
Lizz West: It's probably because of the PayPerPost reviews you do is why you got penalized.
I don't suppose any links you mentioned in that post were included with the "nofollow" attribute?
Oh well, I don't worry a whole lot at this point.
This STILL doesn't explain why JoeTech.com dropped from PR5 to PR0 over night. I didn't sell any paid links and nobody ever told me what I did wrong.
lottobymatch, bear in mind that Google also did a full PageRank update a few weeks ago, and PageRanks can fluctuate naturally as a result of that as well. For example, joetech.com doesn't have any sort of webspam penalty in Google. We do occasionally see PageRank variations for sites because of canonicalization issues. You might check this post for advice, for example: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/09/setting-preferred-domain.html
jason, you didn't mention your site name, but the same advice applies to you as well. In addition, I left this advice on a different site earlier this week:
"We did do a full PageRank update several weeks ago. seomoz.org went down one notch not because of link selling but just because there's less PageRank flowing around in some areas (e.g. search and SEO). Vanessa Fox's site dropped by one as well, and for her as well, it's just a case where less PageRank is flowing in some niches of the net. PageRank doesn't always monotonically increase."
Michael Clark, cross-linking between your own sites can be perfectly fine, especially if the links are relevant and you have a small number of sites. At a site review panel, an audience member once claimed that he had been deindexed by two major search engines for only cross-linking. Tim Mayer from Yahoo asked how many sites he had. The audience member sheepishly replied that he had 1500 (!) sites. I definitely wouldn't recommend heavy cross-linking if you've got that many sites. That's a lot of sites no matter how you slice it.
Lizz West, you may disagree with Google's stance against selling links that pass PageRank, but every major search engine has said similar things to Google on this issue.
I personally have never used purchasing links or any linking program to obtain rankings. I have found that by using the "old school" techniques of meta tags and content within the website while targeting relevant key terms obtains rankings slowly, but the rankings stick indefinately.
I do, however know of some SEO people that use links to obtain rankings and never optimize the website itself just for the results and money, and believe it is not only wrong, but the rankings don't hold.
Than you Google for cracking down on such black hat SEO's.
I would also like to add that with the pagerank update 3 of my websites increased in pagerank by 1-2 points *Yeah*
Keep up the good work!
Jen
SEO Goddess
Everything I know I learned ont he Internet :o)
It's funny, Google penalizes link-sellers, whom i dislike as well, but promotes sites like Dmoz which has no value what-so-ever...lol... Wow Google, way to set those standards!
Business directories actually used by human searchers are easy to distinguish and should be rewarded.
-Eg. Yellowpages, superpages, 411...-
But, useless sites like Dmoz are ranked higher and actually used by google directory. It's like saying that yahoo directory is a valuable reference. Ummm, no, Yahoo sells links. Yahoo Dir is a paid link site Matt! An expensive one too.
Scott
Web Designer
I think that the problem is that this pagerank review seemed to be almost random in its effect which has confused many people.
It seems to have hit sites taking paid posts, yet not all of them by a long way. Others which don't take paid posts have been hit equally hard.
If it is, I think that in time the quality of paid posts will go up dramatically and they'll deserve to be in Google's index too.
The only thing I can see in common with those that have been hit (and I've not seen all, of course) is that they write posts based almost entirely around a single link. Essentially they are writing pure advertisements. Whilst not wanting to single out one site, JoeTech.com looks like that to me: it has advertising style posts, albeit not paid for ones.
On the other hand many taking paid posts haven't been hit. These appear to use the sponsor's link as a trigger for an article (and again, I've not seen all of them). In fact, aside from the relevant posts being tagged "sponsored" or similar, you'd be hard pressed to identify those ones as being paid for.
Is anyone in Google prepared to say if that assumption is correct? ie that advertising style posts are those being hit whilst those that create "proper" articles (albeit some sponsored) are OK.
Thanks for the advice Matt. It's a new blog so I suppose the PR I had for about a week or so could have been a false reading. If not...
Is there any way of asking for a review that doesn't require falsely stating that we've gone against the webmaster guidelines?
This was a great read.
I'm interested to know some things that were not mentioned.
What is your stance on sites like web directories, which are mainly categorized pages of links.
Assume a general web directory has strict guidelines on what gets accepted - based on how a site would satisfy a user (good content, no spammy pop-ups etc) and it therefore only contained high quality websites. This web directory charges a minimum fee for review, but also allows the webmaster to bid for placement - so the higher the webmaster bids the higher ranked in a category page it gets displayed. Should this use nofollow? Where should nofollow be used? On its own detail page? On the category page?
If the minimum fee was for the review of a website, and the webmaster could bid higher for better exposure what actions would you advise the directory owner to take in terms of nofollow use and other things to note in order to avoid some form of penalty.
I have seen some of these bid for placement style directories loose toolbar pagerank, and also have seen some given a SERP penalty - the style where they don't even rank 1st for their own name.
As a directory owner I wish to remain within googles guidelines. The use of nofollow doesn't sound nice, as very few would submit to a directory using nofollow on all external links.
Same spirit as mike.
As a web directory owner and administrator, I'm a bit worried.
Even if my directory is very selective, and the editors who check, and correct every submission manually make an excellent work, I'm worried that Google might simply compare my website architecture to some "models", and "algorithmically" categorize it as a spammy website... although it's not.
In mine, you can't pay for a better position, and you don't have to pay to be reviewed. The static link towards the "customer" website doesn't wear a rel="nofollow" attribute, as it's way too much considered as an insult by webmasters, when they don't simply beleive you want to "keep your PageRank for yourself"... :)
Now one more thing if you please. I do agree with Google's position, and I do appreciate Matt's teams work (you can't say there hasn't been an improvement in SERPs these months), but I must say that all of these problems you have to solve come from one and only thing: the fact that PageRank is displayed in the toolbar.
It's the "voice of God" for too many people who don't understand what these green pixels mean... and if PageRank was not advertised as much as it is, you probably wouldn't have to fight spam and "PageRank-distribution techniques" as you have to do it now.
Matt, let's get back to this discussion about removing PageRank from the toolbar ;)
Can I assume that if my PR did not change, that my site does not violate buying or selling links? The reason I ask is because my site dmovers.com holds some kind of penalty (I think) and I want to narrow down what the penalty could be.
Just a quick question - if Google's aim is to keep their results relevant , why are they removing websites that participate in paid links altogether from searches - shouldn't they contact the webmaster first?
There is simply so much competition out there that great content has to be complemented by links - be they paid or not, after all, rubbish content may skew results for a while but people will soon realise it is useless and the consequences will have to be faced by websites publishing such content.
The truth is - for the first time - Google is scared. They're abusing their power in search rankings to drive services such as PayPerPost and SponsoredReviews out - because many small-website owners have found AdSense pays them peanuts compared to what these websites give.
I used to be a huge fan of Google, but things are starting to change.
My Blog NSpeaks.com came down from PR 4 to PR 0 Suddenly
I was in payperpost directory but didn't even wrote a single review for them. Neither I sold links on my site.
Still couldn't figure out why I got penalised.
I will ask for reconsideration in next few days.
Along the same lines as Mike and Hawkeye my interest is to do with a very new directory I have recently started to promote and how the paid links affect this.
PR is not an issue for me at the moment as the directory is new and of course sits at PR0 for the time being. Some listings within the directory will be on an annual subscription and, as such, they will have way more functionality and features than a basic listing. The listings will be linking back out to the relevant websites and the listing holders will often be linking from their websites to the featured listing on the directory.
Does this fall into the paid links arena as it is not intended to?
Even though I don't want to admit it, I find myself agreeing with Viraj's comments. If a site has relevant content it has relevant content - despite whether it chooses to sell links or not. If Lifehacker.com decided to sell links, would it suddenly mean that content was worse? Are their tips of less value to people searching for them? As a user of search engines, I would want them to give me the most relevant results regardless of whether the source sells links. Wouldn't you agree?
I can see a few other problems here.
1. Google has said in the past to not code their sites for search engines. Now it seems search engines are asking people to add nonstandard HTML attributes for them.
2. I'm curious how Google can tell that money has exchanged hands. Is there proof that money has changed hands or are people assumed to be guilty until proven innocent?
3. How is Google "working with webmasters" on this? My cousin has a site that has been penalized and he says that he yet to receive any communication from Google about it. I don't know if this is the norm, but one would hope not. It seems that people can't tell if Google is doing a normal pagerank update or if they are being penalized. Perhaps Google can give a breakdown or notification of the penalties that are being applied.
By releasing Page rank, Google boosts unfair practices of acquiring unmerited links.
Manipulating search results will last as long as Google release PR or any other part of its algorithm.
"Can I assume that if my PR did not change, that my site does not violate buying or selling links? The reason I ask is because my site dmovers.com holds some kind of penalty (I think) and I want to narrow down what the penalty could be"
In the case of dmovers.com, you're inheriting a bit of an issue from the previous owner of the domain. The domain at one point had keyword stuffing that looked like this:
"Are you seeking any of the following words:
mover, mouse mover, house mover, car mover, international mover, piano mover, nationwide mover, auto mover, personal mouse mover, people mover, mobile home mover, apartment mover, allied mover, lawn mover, furniture mover, first mover advantage, household mover, long distance mover, earth mover, mayflower mover"
and stuff like that. If you do a reconsideration request for dmovers.com and mention that you have nothing to do with the previous owner/text on the domain, I believe that the request should go through just fine.
2-3 people have asked about directories. I've talked about this before, so I'm going to include the answer that I gave at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/ a few months ago:
"Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site."
I hope that helps answer the question of how (say) the Yahoo directory is different from the examples I showed in my post at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/selling-links-that-pass-pagerank/ . I hope it also answers the question of why a "bidding directory" that just gives the top slot to the highest-money bid might not be as trusted by Google.
"Is there any way of asking for a review that doesn't require falsely stating that we've gone against the webmaster guidelines?"
Jason, great question. I don't want to force people to claim that they've violated our guidelines in doing a reconsideration request. I believe that we've already softened our language on that form once and that we added the option to say "something happened on this domain before I got to it."
But your feedback is something that I've heard before, and I'll try to have someone at Google look at what we can do to remove that concern. If you have suggestions for language or the best way to do it, I'm open to whatever you want to propose.
Arnold, it is the case that we don't reduce the PageRank for every site that we know of that is selling links. The reason for that is that we don't want to provide a roadmap of places to buy links.
Matt, Thanks for the reply, but if joetech.com was not penalized, and I have a "preferred domain" set, I can't imagine any good reason for a page rank drop from 5 to zero, especially when some sub-pages still have page ranks and have a lot less links back to them. Here's what I see in Webmaster Tools: "The preferred domain name www.joetech.com was set on Feb 5, 2007."
Hi Matt,
Thanks for the reply. Your a good guy.
Nuts! Now I have to pay the Dmoz editors to list my crappy sites again.
=-(
Thanks for the reply on directories Matt, my mind has been put to rest a little as our directory does not link out to a website unless the owner has put in relevant and useful content regarding their business and/or product. The directory is a resource for listing businesses and not individual websites.
Thanks for the useful link: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/ ...now I just need to book a weeks holiday to read all the comments!
Thanks, sritchie70--I appreciate that. I've heard a lot of claims about DMOZ editors being corrupt, but I don't think I've seen any documented examples. If you are looking for links, either debunking that myth or providing some evidence either way would be one way to get links. Just a thought.
Glen, one thing to bear in mind is that for all the hundreds of comments on that thread, there have been more than an order of magnitude more reports of paid links into our spam report form. So while there are some people debating this loudly on the web, there is also a large number of people who have been helping Google with reports, even if they aren't as vocal on the web.
By the way, if you're traveling to PubCon or traveling for the holidays, you could open up that thread in a laptop and read it on the plane journey. :)
My name is Ghosty, and I'm an ex PPPer.
First, Matt, I don't read your blog, so all that great commentary these past couple of years slipped right by me. Of course, I plan to correct that oversight shortly. :)
Second, many of us who did work for PPP and similar companies weren't thinking about selling links. We were thinking about getting paid for writing posts. Honestly, the whole bit about selling links didn't cross my mind until I started getting wind of all this.
Now I know better, I have to say Google is absolutely correct in it's stance. Companies who can afford to purchase large numbers of links unfairly affect the popularity of a site in a search engine.
I am also quite upset at some of my former-fellow PPPers, who seem to have the mistaken idea that Google owes everyone a means to make a living from their blog. No, it doesn't, nor would it make sense for that to happen.
My only remaining issue is that Google never sent me a warning. I have a Blogger blog. I have GMail. I have Analytics, and I have an account with Webmaster Tools. An email saying "you're breaking our rules, and here's why" would have been nice because, hey, I work 10-hour days and don't have remaining time to read Google's TOS and assorted blogs on top of writing in my own. And you can betchum sweet bibby I'd have followed up on it, too.
Live and learn. Got my PR and my search traffic back, so I'm happy.
Hey Ghosty! I appreciate your feedback, and we'll do some thinking about whether it's possible to add a notification message in the Google webmaster console.
Typically our first priority is to protect our index quality, but after that I agree that it's important to communicate.
We saw this happen with malware as well. First we were taking action to remove the malware from our search results. Then we started to do more communication with site owners when we detected a malware problem. Now we're much better about alerting site owners about malware on their site (although I wouldn't claim we're perfect).
In the same way, I agree that it would be nice to alert site owners if we think this is an issue for them. I wouldn't expect us to send out notices right now, but it's a good suggestion and I'll see if we can work on that.
"Arnold, it is the case that we don't reduce the PageRank for every site that we know of that is selling links. The reason for that is that we don't want to provide a roadmap of places to buy links."
^^^^ Please explain what you mean by this.
It could be interpreted as "We'll punish some people, but not others".
You are going to reduce the page rank for EVERYONE selling links, right? You're not going to selectively choose sites which won't get penalized for whatever reasons, right? If you find absolute proof that a site is selling links and not putting in a no follow as you request, that will mean their page rank is reduced to a 0, correct?
How can reducing the page rank of sites be considered providing a roadmap of places to buy links?
Your logic seems faulty on this one.
I have one very big question. Why do I have to be penalized for violating some terms of service that I never asked you to give me in the first place? Why are blogs that deal with paid posts getting spanked like little kids when, in fact, google is acting like little children because they are not getting the whole money pie?
I am NOT trying to be malicious here. Just asking a fair question. I really do want to know. Now, do not give me some blarney answer please.
By the way, my MINISTRY SITE that sells absolutely NOTHING got hit too. Care to comment?
Hi jaz, I already tackled the question of why some sites that aren't selling links may have gone down in PageRank a little bit too. Here's what I said in a previous comment on this thread:
"We did do a full PageRank update several weeks ago. seomoz.org went down one notch not because of link selling but just because there's less PageRank flowing around in some areas (e.g. search and SEO). Vanessa Fox's site dropped by one as well, and for her as well, it's just a case where less PageRank is flowing in some niches of the net. PageRank doesn't always monotonically increase."
"Why do I have to be penalized for violating some terms of service that I never asked you to give me in the first place?"
jaz, Google tries to rank sites in a way that we feel is good for our users. We believe that buying/selling links that pass PageRank is bad for relevance on the web. Accordingly, if a site is selling links (for example), that can cause Google to lose trust in the website.
Thanks for your reply Matt.
So, even for pure advertisement purposes it seems google does not trust a bid for placement directory.
Is this because you can bid for PR?
Because webmasters are weak and when someone bids a low quality site high they are too weak to reject it?
Should it be treated differently to featured/sponsored listings on other general directories?
Also on another note, why would a directory like this not take a PR cut like other sites selling links?
My site (zorg-links.com and other sites like avivadirectory.com, alivedirectory.com) all have some sort of ranking penalty where they are outside the top few pages. This was obviously some form of penalty. What can you advise webmasters like us to do to avoid this in the future, and can we do anything to get this penalty removed? If so, what?
Thanks for your response so far.
Thanks for answering my questions. I am sorry. I do not care for the way that Google does business.
And trust is a two way street. I do not trust Google at all. According to what I am reading, my blog is in violation of a TOS from a company I did not invite into my life at all.
From the way I see it, Google is unhappy with the bloggers who are getting money for the same thing they are doing.
Their profits are heading downward or will be if they don't stop the bleeding. So, they figure out a way to deal quite unfairly with the blogger...blow apart the so-called "gift" of PR to zero if they have dared to use their blog in a manner they see fit.
Tell me something. How are a few bloggers hurting anything with Google at all? I know that you have probably answered this endlessly but there are a lot of us bloggers out here that believe Google is an arrogant dictator wannabe that is throwing it's power around and hurting the little guys while sucking up to the big guys.
I cannot tell you how much I dislike your company telling me what I can and cannot have on my blog. And how on earth can you tell which links are paid and which are not?
For instance, I do A LOT of reviews for items I simply like and give a link. No one paid me to do that. I just like the item. Google punishes me for having a link that is Do follow. And yes, I do paid posts. It's no secret. My blogs are sitting at PR ZERO because of an arrogant company that says I violate their precious TOS.
I ask you, what right does Google have telling me what is or is not on MY blog??? I DO NOT WORK FOR GOOGLE. THEY HAVE NO RIGHT TO TELL ME anything I am or am not violating.
What are you people? The net police? No, I am not friendly to Google. I am simply a disabled person getting pocket change from social security for income and trying to make a tiny bit more. Your jerk company is trashing my income just like they are trashing the single mother's incomes.
You people SHOULD be ashamed of yourselves. I will be so glad when your doofus ranking system is no longer an issue in the companies I work for.
jaz, I'm sorry you feel that way. I understand that you're angry at Google, but this is not a Google-only issue. *Every* major search engine that has been asked about these links has come out opposed to such links.
If it's okay, I would like to re-iterate one answer from the post:
"Q: Is Google trying to tell webmasters how to run their own site?
A: No. We're giving advice to webmasters who want to do well in Google. As I said in this video from my keynote discussion in June 2007, webmasters are welcome to make their sites however they like, but Google in turn reserves the right to protect the quality and relevance of our index. To the best of our knowledge, all the major search engines have adopted similar positions."
That is, you're welcome to do whatever you want on your website, but in turn Google has to have the right to defend the quality of our search results.
On my personal blog I walked through a concrete example of why Google doesn't want to count paid links that pass PageRank. That post is here if you want to read it: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/selling-links-that-pass-pagerank/
Hi Matt,
There is an issue which I hope you can clarify when you have the time.
How does Google see a "free" country web directory set up for the convenience of users?
In this type of directory, any sites relevant to the particular country can be added by the directory owner as long as the sites are of decent content, legitimate and useful for all.
For example, users are able to view/find all the florist/plastic surgeon websites within a country through this type of directory instead of filtering results from the search engines.
Will Google treat this type of directory as a free-for-all link site or deem it as of low quality?
Also, Is "no-follow" required for this type of directory?
Thanks in advance.
Hi Matt
I agree completely with Google's policy in this matter. It's unfortunate that some people with worthless sites have gotten angry because they are no longer allowed to cheat their way to an undeserved higher position in the search results.
jaz, if you dislike Google and don't agree with its terms and policies you can always opt out get de-listed.
"Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results."
If that were indeed true you would NOT:
1) Be practing Web Apartheid, where you divide the Web into the HAVEs (pages with PageRank) and HAVE NOTs (pages without PageRank) and favoring the HAVEs over the HAVE NOTs in your search results.
As long as Google continues to willfully and intentionally bury the most relevant, unique Supplemental Results behind less relevant Main Web Index results, your goal is by no means "to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results". Rather, your goal is clearly to prove that PageRank can be made to work despite the fact that it never has.
2) Be misleading people about what constitutes normal and acceptable linking practices. The buying and selling of unlabeled links predates Google's existence and since Google does not strip PageRank link-selling sites like Yahoo! of their ability to pass PageRank your policy is clearly not beneficial to your users as anyone with enough money can still go out and buy all the PageRank they need through Google-approved link selling sources that don't have to use rel='nofollow'.
3) Use clearly deceptive illustrative examples that make it seem like all paid links are spammy and easy to find. If they were indeed easy to find, you wouldn't be asking people to report them to you.
4) Promoting Wikipedia content -- which has been shown through numerous examples in blogs and news stories to often be inaccurate, unreliable, and/or false/misleading -- above legitimate, authoritative information resources on the thin justification that "since most of Google's users don't know any better it won't bother them to see Wikipedia results".
People could be making life and death decisions on the basis of what they find in Google's search results so Google needs to stop playing games and let the content rank on the basis of relevance. Google doesn't know enough about every topic to ensure that its artificially favored pet sites will present Google users with safe, reliable information.
I call upon Google to begin practicing good ethics, to respect the business models that predate its existence, and to stop misrepresenting the fact that it created a horrendous problem by requiring sites to have PageRank in order to be included in the Main Web Results.
It's time for Google to practice honest, fair, ethical search index management.
We got hit rather randomly with PR0s all over the place on some of our main country pages at http://www.justlanded.com. When I say random; Spain in English went from PR6 to PR0, while Spain in Dutch stayed at PR5. We don't sell links and no-follow user-generated and our directory. However, we just ignored this as it doesn't look like we have reduced traffic. Now I have just had an advertising customer blow out because he saw PR0 in his Google toolbar and fancies himself a bit of an expert... So now we are double screwed - to summarise:
1) we have just lost an advertising customer
2) we don't know if we have a penalty or not
3) we have no way of asking Google and the only way we can 'interface' with this to fix the [potential] problem is play double-jeopardy with an 'admit guilt and [beg forgiveness and] make a reinclusion request...
Please, please, please consider removing the page rank bar from the consumer Google toolbar. I believe visible PR has little to do with SERPs - you guys are too bright for that - but it has certainly had an effect on our sales (mmm, thinking about it, I guess that won't bother you guys much ;)
Google should understand that they have become nearly a monopoly in web Search. Google's trademarked name has even become a synecdoche for "doing a web search." No one questions what "Googling for" means. Thus when you say, "We're giving advice to webmasters who want to do well in Google", the effect is the same as "we are telling you what you need to do to receive visitors in web search." One could see how webmasters might view this as Google flexing it's power as a monopoly - and may even make the leap that "Google is being evil."
Matt also said, "Google tries to rank sites in a way that we feel is good for our users... Accordingly, if a site is selling links (for example), that can cause Google to lose trust in the website." I'm trying to figure out how the balance of this plays out. If a web site has some unique extremely valuable content to it's users (let's say a cure for Cancer with 100% success rate), but decides to include that may appear to be paid links. Google's stance is that this website can not be trusted? This is despite all the potential lives it could save? What if the website has been around 5 years and has done nothing fishy, but giving advertisers what they ask for? Obviously this is a real case, but you can see my point that content that is good for your users should not be connected to content owner's advertising strategy.
Matt, if you could, I'm still looking for an answer on how Google can prove that money has exchanged hands (from my earlier question). I realize I may be bringing some challenging situations here, but I think if these would be answered, people would understand Google's stance better.
Matt replied to my reply: "Michael Clark, cross-linking between your own sites can be perfectly fine, especially if the links are relevant and you have a small number of sites."
Thanks for the comment. So you're implying if I link from my Washington DC region theater web site to my Christmas music web site, that is a bad thing to do, since Christmas music is not related to theater? I don't like where this is heading, it seems overly broad.
It also seems like the search engines are heading into an opt-out system (rel="nofollow") instead of an opt-in system for link quality. Maybe support for rev="vote-for" should be implemented by the search engines.
Hi Matt,
Hadn't read all the comments on your blog when I posted above - so Matt has already commented here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/selling-links-that-pass-pagerank/ about possible future changes to the 'reinclusion request' page. and acknowledged the question of how you find out if you have a penalty in the first place. It's also worth checking out that thread (if you can dodge the flames).
Why is it the job of Webmasters to validate flaws in your own algorithim and business model?
First of all, I am so sorry for posting a complain to this comment form.
It was 3 days ago, I had a problem with my blog. I can't write any post to my blog (success-4-u.blogspot.com) because it was detected by blogger as a spam blog. I sent the confirmation and got a reply that blogger had reviewed my blog. Then I log in to my account, but I was so surprised when I enter my blog url in the browser and I did not found my blog (page not found). My username is ( dollarsman or sulhanudin).
Did blogger team/management has deleted my blog? If the answer is yes, why? What was the problem. Or did someone has proposed to blogger to delet my blog? If yes, why blogger did not send me any confirmation, and of course the core reason why did you delet my blog.
I actually have sent you an email asking this problem, but up to now I have not yet received any confirmation from blogger team.
I also have tried to find the answer from blogger help, but It doesn't help me much. And when I click Contact Page, I have to read the help support center again. So, that's why I write this here..........
Apologies if this has been covered, but will the web site who purchased links/received PR suffer any penalty beyond removal of those links value? i.e. - will it be a "bad neighborhoood" link situation where you are worse off by having the link than by not having the link at all?
Since Matt Cutts seems to be answering here something that has me enraged.
I'm fine with the PPP, no follow stuff. Carry on.
However. At my blog (timworstall.typepad.com/timworstall)I had a post which wasn't PPP, wasn't in fact anything which breached any (that I know of) Google rules.
In fact, that post was a first page Google result for the relevant search terms. 1,500 page views an hour in fact, as there were a lot of people searching for those search terms.
So it was in the Google index, that post. Now it isn't.
In fact, all of my posts from that day did turn up in the index...and all of them are not there now.
Posts from days before, and posts from days after, are. But not from that day.
Why ?
SORRY MATT, MY CAPS KEY IS BROKEN. I'M GETTING A NEW KEYBOARD TONIGHT.
BUT HERE'S WHERE I THINK GOOGLE DOES EVIL...
IF GOOGLE HAD TO ACTUALLY ASK PEOPLE FOR PERMISSION TO INDEX THEIR WEBSITES RATHER THAN HAVING JUST INDEXED THEM AND THEN (AREN'T YOU SO KIND) OFFERED PEOPLE A WAY TO KEEP FROM BEING INDEXED, THEN GOOGLE MIGHT NOT BE AS BIG AND POWERFUL AS IT IS.
LIKE ANY OF US, IT WOULD HAVE TO WORK HARD FOR OUR VOTE RATHER THAN JUST STEAL IT AND GIVE US THE ABILITY TO OPT OUT AFTER-THE-FACT.
SO IF YOU WANT TO PROTECT YOUR INDEX, THEN YOU SHOULD TAKE GREAT CARE TO PROTECT THOSE WHO TOOK THE OPPORTUNITY TO TAKE ADVANTAGE WHERE IT EXISTED. IT WASN'T THEIR FAULT THAT YOU DIDN'T ADDRESS IT SOONER OR THAT THE INFORMATION IS BURIED ON PAGE 8 MILLION OF YOUR TOS.
BEING REALISTIC, WHO HAS THE TIME TO READ 8,000 TOS PAGES ON THE DOZENS OF OPPS THAT AFFECT THEIR DAILY LIVES EACH TIME THEY UPDATE.
OH SO ITS OUR FAULT WE DON'T HOVER OVER A NEWSREADER TO BE WARNED ABOUT YOUR LATEST WITCH HUNT?
INSTEAD, FIND A WAY TO PROTECT THOSE WHO GET UNWITTINGLY CAUGHT UP IN YOUR GROWING PAINS BECAUSE IT IS YOUR FAULT THEY'RE TUGGING ON YOUR APRON STRINGS TO BEGIN WITH...
ARRIVADERCI,
SAM
I've read all of the posts across the web claiming that the PR drops only affected sites that were part of PPP. The problem is, we run an e-commerce site. We don't deal with PPP, we don't sell links, everything is on the up and up - And yet our site fell from a PR5 to a PR0 during this last update.
This isn't a fly-by-night operation, but a real business that's been on the web for over 4 years now.
How do I get someone to look at our site and find out what happened?
Matt Cutts ,you are talking like George Bush.
what is the differences between avivadirectory and dir.yahoo.com
Say me directly not political.both are aprove my any kind urls when i pay thier TOS prices. both hasnt got any rewiew step also. i exprienced both for my MFA site and both are aproved when i pay price.
Let me explain differences yahoo and alivedirectory.com .Yahoo allow PORN sites if i pay $600 buy alive does not..if you are really brave heart, BAN dir.yahoo.com.
i wish microsoft can buy yahoo.com,and become leader of search engine industry...
Do not be evil GG do not Be...
Regards.
Cafer
Dear Matt
ZZZZZZZZZZ
text-link-ads.com PR7
linkadage.com PR 5
Who are you lying to??????
Hey guys, stop asking real questions as Matt will only answer to those who likes to. As you notice there is no real answer to any relevant question.
I'm one of the lucky webmasters that hasn't been hit by these silly penalties (except one site which has been reported on these forums by a stranger for no reason and obviously King Google hurried to aply a penalty on it).
I think Matt is smart enough to realize there are people smarter than him reading all these and analyzing his words...this is why he will never give a straight answer.
I also think that what Google does it's just a cheap and sad Nazi technique meaning to increase their profits and having as an excuse the quality of their searches. (how lame!)
Matt, I'll tell you a story...real story. I know a family - professional writers - they used to run several blogs for fun at the begining...writing about their hobbies quality and useful content both for the users and SE's. Obviously Google like the fresh, unique content and their blogs gained PR and a lot of visitors. At this stage the advertisers came in and start offering to buy some advertising space on these blogs. This family accepted to add no more than 10 ads on each blog (4 banners and 6 text links). As the blogs became more and more popular they start earning a fair income from advertising - their only income. At the same time they wrote more and more quality unique content for interested readers...until one day when Google decided to penalize all of the blogs so they went from PR5 and 4 to PR0. No more income for this family as the advertisers believe that PR is everything in this world...What did they do wrong? They just found a way to make a few bucks and a living from what they love most - writing. Now both of them are lost and desperate to find new jobs...
Matt, I'm sure you'll have a nice, wonderful Christmas...they won't...and btw...they just had their first baby...it would be nice for Santa Google to send them a present if you just took their only living...
Now, as I'm sure you know...every wonderful thing has a begining. a peak level and then an end...this is nature if you like... Well, Matt...the end is closer than you ever thought for Google. I'm not Nostradamus, I don't do predictions but what has been built by humans will end at some point.
We built Google, the webmasters from all over world, not you guys. We feed Google, not you guys. You just found a way to get tons of money from our work.
I wonder what's gonna happend one day if let's say 99% of the websites on the internet will add a small code: User-agent: GoogleBot
Disallow: * or ...content="noindex, nofollow"> for google's bots. I know it sound impossible but believe me from what I've heard it is not the way you think guys. We, the webmasters, not you Google's servants built this SE. We work hard and you just monetize our work. We feed you, we give you content, we give you a reason to make money...I think you should not bite the hand who feeds you...webmasters are more important than readers and this is the way it should be from G's point of view. Instead of that you just choosed to hide behind that silly reason (providing quality for visitors)
Regarding the paid links....do you guys have the courage to penalize yahoo directory, business.com, botw and all the other giants? Obviously not...that's why you choose to hit the little nobody.
Simple question Matt (I expect a simple answer) Why did you penalized AliveDirectory.com ? Have you ever browsed that directory? Ten times more quality than Yahoo directory! I used to have an email exchange in the past with Chris, Alive's owner...he is one of the fewest people with high moral integrity I ever talked with. He is also a business model for many young people out there. Why did you penalised Alive? They did a fantastic promotional job they spent a lot on advertising their business and they really have editorial integrity unlike dmoz or yahoo directory. Waiting for a simple answer, Matt...simple...why?
Personally I think this is just the begining of the end for Google, honestly...my opinion (anyway my opinion is not important, is it?)Through history all the big civilisations raised and falled in the dust...no one lives forever, Matt...not even Google.
Remember what I said...there will be a day sooner rather than later when you'll have nothing to index but a few MFA sites and that day is pretty close...
A single webmaster is not powerful but when many of them get together, Google should care...
Didn't mean to offence your perfect system but you should care about us a bit more...just my two cents...
Now smile, the Christmas is here and it's beautiful (try to explain this to the family I was talking above)...
What about web designers that have a portfolio of their clients? We all link to our clients... is that deemed *bad* by the Google gods? I have NO paid links what so ever and was docked 2 on PR. I've had PR 6 for years and years...
I'm confused. Adsense pays me for links on my site. So those are paid links. Am I going to lose PR for using adsense?
I'm new at all this so sorry if that's a stupid question. Trying to figure out which paid links are the bad ones.
Thanks,
Michelle
"Hey guys, stop asking real questions as Matt will only answer to those who likes to."
MLP, I've been answering a lot of questions, but I haven't gotten a chance to reply to everyone. I'm packing tonight to go to the PubCon search conference tomorrow, and I'll be at that conference until Friday, but I will try to stop by when I can to answer questions.
I have a long reply I want to write to Michael Martinez, for example, but because it's a long reply, it will take time.
"Adsense pays me for links on my site. So those are paid links. Am I going to lose PR for using adsense?"
Michelle, the litmus test is whether a paid link passes PageRank or otherwise affects search engines. Some people try to buy lots of links in order to rank highly in search engines. That's not fair to searchers (because it hurts the relevance of search engines), and it's not fair to the people that try to compete without buying links.
The vast majority of advertising on the web does not pass PageRank and does not affect search engines. With AdSense, for example, the code is in JavaScript and iframes (most search engines don't crawl iframes), plus the links go through a redirect that is robots.txt'ed out. That makes sure that search engines aren't affected by AdSense links.
Sage & Seven, see my comments earlier about PageRank going down for some sites in the SEO/search niche, just because there's less PageRank flowing in the niche.
In general, I wouldn't worry at all about having a portfolio and linking to your clients. Now if you have thousands of clients and all their sites are really spammy or keyword-stuffed, then I might worry a bit, but it doesn't sound like that would be an issue for you.
"Simple question Matt (I expect a simple answer) Why did you penalized AliveDirectory.com ? Have you ever browsed that directory? Ten times more quality than Yahoo directory!"
MLP, I browsed for a couple minutes and noticed that at http://www.alivedirectory.com/submit.php
they appear to require a reciprocal link with every submission. I haven't seen that many directories that *require* you to link to them when you submit a url.
"Matt Cutts ,you are talking like George Bush.
what is the differences between avivadirectory and dir.yahoo.com"
Cafercan, I checked out http://www.avivadirectory.com/submit.php and it looks like that directory also asks for a reciprocal link with every website submission? Again, if a directory is already charging for submitting urls, why are they also requiring a reciprocal link so that you have to link to the directory too?
In addition, look at the "Resources" section of that site. See the "Apahcinc" directory? Why do you think that they picked the name "Apahcinc" for a directory? Seems kinda random, doesn't it?
Well, I'll tell you why the funny name. Because apahcinc.org used to be a non-profit: http://web.archive.org/web/20040523050332/http://www.apahcinc.org/
It was the Asian Pacific American Heritage Council. Now the domain is a pay-money-for-listing directory.
So avivadirectory appears to be listing as a "Resource" this use-to-be-a-nonprofit-domain,-now-it-is-a-for-pay directory. And there's the fact that every url submission has that "reciprocal url" field. If you can't see any difference between that and Yahoo, then we'll just have to agree not to see eye to eye.
Cartman, if it's the site listed in your blogger profile, it's certainly possible that we're not trusting domains as much that are upstream from you. For example, if there were a large number of xxxxxgab.com domains where xxxxx was the name of a team, then we might not be trusting boilerplate links that say things like "Purchase your Indianapolis Colts tickets, Colts Patriots tickets, and Colts Chiefs tickets from a reputable Indianapolis ticket broker. XXXXXXXXX XXXXX has Colts Tickets to every game! Cheap Colts Tickets available now."
Remember that if we lose trust in sites that link to you, those sites may flow less PageRank, and so that might affect the PageRank shown for your site.
Hey Sam Freedom, nice to meet you. I think the pair of blog posts that we did this weekend should help raise awareness about our stance. One thing that we wanted to do with these posts was to try to get our stance across clearly. With the post on my personal blog, my hope is that giving a real-world example would also show that paid links are not always great for users.
Tim Worstall, that doesn't sound like an issue related to anything we're talking about here. Google does have a finite crawl budget, so sometimes sites don't get crawled as deeply as they might want. Sometimes it can be something as simple as a web server not responding when Googlebot comes visiting.
I'd give it 2-3 days to see if the page is crawled and shows up.
Michael Clark, I think a link like that would be fine. If you had 1500 sites and wanted to cross-link them all, or your sites were all cheap-viagra-debt-consolidation.cn spammy-ish looking domains, then I'd be more cautious.
What I might recommend is to make an "Other Sites" page that says "If you liked this service, you might enjoy some of my other sites." That way you're completely upfront with your users.
"Tim Worstall, that doesn't sound like an issue related to anything we're talking about here. Google does have a finite crawl budget, so sometimes sites don't get crawled as deeply as they might want. Sometimes it can be something as simple as a web server not responding when Googlebot comes visiting."
OK, thanks for the answer. Not reappeared yet, but I understand he point. Just galling to lose that much traffic....
I think in all this the fundamental problem is that the PR is being understood and used in two entirely different ways.
I can see that google use it as an indication of "authority" in a particular webpage. Therefore, they don't want that "authority" passed on where it's not warranted. Therefore they don't want PR passed on sponsored posts because those links MAY be influenced by the cash.
However, the paid posters and the advertisers don't, for the most part, see it like that. Yes, there's the "authority" aspect of it and presumably google's algorithm tots up the authorities passed on thereby augmenting that of the advertiser. However, most advertisers use the PR merely as an indication of the traffic on a particular site/blog.
That's, of course, quite different. I often get higher traffic on my sites that have lower PR and I'm sure many others are the same.
Rather than take your ball home, couldn't you guys have put another measure ie list pagerank as the "authority" but also "sitetraffic"? The problem is that in the absence of that second measure, we now have the silly situation where PPP are in the process of introducing that measure and also encouraging the use of other measures such as the (laughably manipulable) alexa rank.
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/sup
No rel= and PR9. So... is it that they can't use nofollow because, afterall... this is the governing body for the HTML Markup language.
SEs added the attribute rel=nofollow to the element href with, AFAIK, absolutelyy no input from the governing body.
Matt can you clarify on this?
Is there any discussion with the HTML governing body about the W3C managing this attribute as part of the HTML standard?
I understand why SE's want the attribute. As I understand it this is not just a Google wish all SEs want this attribute used correct?
My biggest concern is 13-14 years of watching the SEs has left me with the bad feeling that this will eventually be mismanaged like every other tag/protocol SEs have created or adopted.
If this is about informing webmasters about SEs' non compliant attribute wouldn't the W3C be the place to start an ORDERLY transition and a documented source for webmasters who want to use it properly? I mean if I wanted info on an attribute that'd be the first place I'd look, not Googles' Webmaster page.
Google seems to assume that the W3C are above reproach and don't link for dough... even though it has links to Dubai Apartments and a host of other sites that paid them. It says so right on the page, so... wazzup wid dat!
One could assume that there are 2 classes of sites, those that can link for $, and those that are spammers. Creating a fear that those who list on these link spammers will also be penalized takes this "to a whole nudder lebel" of fear mongering! Also contrary to what what was thuoght to be the case in the past. So all I need to do to penalize my competition is submit them to these directories and spammers sites! Please don't say that isn't the case if you are penalizing sites that SEEMINGLY buy text links.
Can you clarify this please as lots of Members of SeoPros have expressed this concern about us!
So I'm a web designer and I link to my clients from my portfolio and I like to have that nice logo declaring my code is perfect... I also need that to qualify for SeoConsultants Directory, however, I add a nofollow because Google says I have to, contrary to its own instructions which say not to do things JUST for SEs, and now my code doesn't pass and I have to remove that nice logo declaring I write perfect code.
Now I've lost credibility, because it seems my pages don't "heaven forbid" validate and I never intended to sell text ads just show my portfolio and recommend the services of my clients who are all upstanding companies that I recommend daily!
No way, no how, this can be fair or not hurt the results. What's interesting is almost all the link hos' who were in the results pre Florida are back! How can Google say this change has been successful at eliminating paid links? All it did was take money out of publishers pockets and reward the worst of a really bad lot!
Matt, there are still ads for text link brokers in Canada.
Thanks for the answer Matt.
In my niche.. my geographical area and what I do >> if you look at my competition, none of them lost PR. Just me. My page hasn't changed, except for very minor edits here and there over the years. While I still rank #1 for my *money phrase* - I didn't see the PR drop for anyone around me, which makes me suspicious. I realize that PR isn't very useful for what I do but the fact that it dropped 2 whole points for the first time EVER sure has me wondering whats up and why it's only me on the radar.
Hey Matt,
I’m sure this is the case, but I just want to double check. Google only goes after the sites that sell the link, not the site where the selling site links to.
As an example, a site that sells links has a link to Company A. Google only lowers the page rank for the selling site, not Company A.
If Google does in fact also lower the page rank of Company A, could you please explain why.
Thanks.
Eric, my understanding is that the site being linked to will loose the pagerank passed by the paid link. Of course if you buy lots of paid links you will label yourself a bit spammy and incur stricter penalties for sure.
Maybe I should actually let Matt answer that one ;)
Thanks Glen.
For the record, I have not purchased any links. However, if this is the case, what is to stop a company from buying links that link to their competitor so their rankings will go down.
If what you are saying is in fact the case, Company A can buy links which point to Company B’s site. Now, Company B will lose rank despite it doing nothing. This seems perverse to me.
Note: I am not even thinking about doing this. It is more out of curiosity and something for Google to consider.
A lot of webmasters are very worried about just that Eric. I'm sure Matt can shed some light on it but there seems a huge amount of variables to be able to come up with a definitive guideline for webmasters.
Over to you Matt!
"Simple question Matt (I expect a simple answer) Why did you penalized AliveDirectory.com ? Have you ever browsed that directory? Ten times more quality than Yahoo directory!"
"MLP, I browsed for a couple minutes and noticed that at http://www.alivedirectory.com/submit.php
they appear to require a reciprocal link with every submission. I haven't seen that many directories that *require* you to link to them when you submit a url."
Matt Cutts I'm really sorry so say but you don't know what you are talking about. This is the most unprofessional answer I ever heard!
LOL...I can't stop laughing!
AliveDirectory.com NEVER ever asked for a reciprocal link. Same AvivaDirectory which you answered to someone else!
Check again this page an tell me what do you see?
http://www.alivedirectory.com/submit.php
Every single web directory in the world running on phpld script has a feature to reciprocal link if you like to. No submiter will be ever forced to add a reciprocal link and to pay for his link at the same time! As I said this is only a feature - if you want to go for it as a submiter, feel free to reciprocate the link, if not choose from many other review plans!
Even if you were right (110% your not) how can you tell that AliveDirectory has been penalised just for this? This was an authority site a few months ago and even if you decided to drop its PR fro 6 to 4 for whatever silly reasons oyou guys invented...how come you can't even find alivedirectory for its own name in the searches? Type in your Google browser alivedirectory and you should see which websites appera on the first page - not even related or little related with the directory itself.
So you dropped Alive's PR and dropped them from searches just because you thought they ask for reciprocal with every submission? LOL...hahaha...
With all respects...you are the spokesman, Google's voice...and if you come with this sort of empty (better read silly) answers I really can imagine how professional is your attitude guys!
Jesus Christ! ...believe me or not I'm still laughing...
Thanks for the help Glen. I understand if Google wants to go after those who sell links. I can understand how Google would give paid links no value. I just don’t understand how Google can go after the potential innocent.
Matt, do you have any input. Thanks.
Matt I am very interested in your responses on web directories.
After your half hearted response about alive directory and aviva directory (very poor excuses to be honest) why not go into more depth.
ewebpages.org a web directory full fo quality sites penalised in google when it has no reciprocal link option and charges a reasonable review fee.
bigweblinks.com what about that site aswell?
Big question! What if I don't buy, or sell links, but want to use the rel="no follow" anyways on my outgoing links, so that it's very very clear we don't sell links?
If I use rel=nofollow am I inadvertently telling google that I AM selling links?? :)
Thank you!
Hi Matt,
I'm the owner of Aviva Directory and Apahcinc.
Aviva Directory does NOT require a reciprocal link. You can see that, like most web forms, there is no star next to the field indicating that it is mandatory. Nowhere in the submission guidelines does it state that this is required. This is simply the way the software is set up. You can see this for yourself, simply by doing this search:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=phpld+inurl%3Asubmit.php&meta=
By your logic, every directory that uses this script should be penalized in Google on that basis alone.
Surely, Google has sophisticated enough tools to tell whether a site is manipulating its rankings through reciprocal links. If you check Aviva Directory, you won't find many reciprocal links, and most submitters do NOT provide a reciprocal link. Instead you will find some very natural, organic backlinks from very authoritative sites point to Aviva.
As for Apahcinc, yes, you're right, it didn't use to be a web directory. Lots of sites change over time. If you actually take the trouble to look at the contents of Apahcinc, I think you'll find that my team has made a good effort at listing a lot of quality sites. We aim to add about 50 sites editorially for every site submitted.
I have to say that I'm somewhat shocked that Google makes such major decisions on such a flimsy review. Certainly, when I'm reviewing sites for inclusion in my directories, I give them a more thorough review than that.
I own 200 websites hosted in 4 countries , how can google possibly tell that they are all mine?I invested over $147,000 this year buying websites based on the pr ,traffic ,income etc.So my pr6 blog gave my gambling sites links and the site went to pr4.I have 2 pr7 that fell to pr4 ,the only links on the dropped pr4 websites were to sites that i own.The site has a natual pr8 backlink and has for the past 8+ years..So what should a person like me do?Spend $10,000 a month in advertising or interlink the websites I already own and watch them all fall to pr0.
Absolutely true. It will become a no follow attribute . How accurate is this?Can you please prove it...Thanks
hi matt,
i am just a friendly guy who is here to ask you several questions. Talk about directories manipulating rankings and such
www.idk.in - moved down to pr 3 ?
Why did that happen ? The site rejected tons of sites...
Second i think what do you mean by quality who is to justify quality i mean i see MFA sites showing up in google. Adult sites showing up in google. That means the biggest spam on the net is the Google Search Engine ?
Please justify :) so next time people know what to do and how to determine the quality of a website ..
Because apparently i am poor at reviewing and dont know how to review.
Btw: Larry page have so much money why doesn't he hire someone better than you to answer our questions because you have no idea how the software is set up and blame the degradation and penalty of alive on the reciprocal listing.
"I'm the owner of Aviva Directory and Apahcinc."
Hi Jeffrey, good to have confirmation of that. Regular folks might not be able to tell that at first glance, since it's hard to find any contact info on either site, and the whois information appears to be private.
I also see the kwikgoblin.com directory and the web10.ws directory listed as resources on avivadirectory.com. Is it correct to assume that you own those directories too? I suppose my question would be how many directories you run. Are there any other directories you run?
Hi Matt,
If I put my URL up here can you look into it why my site went from averaging 300 visitors a day down to 10. It wasn't graduall it was instant. 12 PM Sept 6th. I put in a re-inclusion request with what I thought I did wrong but nothing has changed. My PR even stayed the same after my site was penalized before the last PR update.
Thanks in advance for your answer,
Jason
Hi Matt,
Thanks for responding. I really appreciate it as I know how busy you are right now.
I own all the web directories listed as resources on Aviva - Sevenseek, Kwikgoblin, Apahcinc and Web10. I also own Umdum.com.
"What I might recommend is to make an "Other Sites" page that says "If you liked this service, you might enjoy some of my other sites." That way you're completely upfront with your users."
This looks a very important thing to be learnt by loads of webmasters: "do links for visitors".
I believe that any link should pass "juice" (I hate simplifying the link juice to a [0-10] integer, thus I won't say "PageRank"), as long as it's obviously a link made for visitors, and not for pushing another website up.
Footer links (spread over all pages of the website) between partners seem to be more than stupid: nobody looks down there.
Building huge linkings like that doesn't even help in climbing on SERPs: 1 good link is way better than 1000 bad ones.
The "partner page" system, or "Other sites" as Matt names it, is for me the best practice.
You shouldn't have a thousand partners... your "partners" page shouldn't be a huge bag of flashing icons and banners, but just a small, optimized, clean page where the websites of your 10, 20 maybe 50 at max partners are listed, but also described (the "snippet" way).
Link this page from your website most important pages or directly from your menu, and you get a strong page with natural links towards quality websites.
These links are definitely made for visitors, not for search engines, and...
...seriously... what do you prefer?
- a PR2 website with thousands of uniques per day
or
- a PR5 with nobody on it
eh ?
Matt, my apologies for asking about sites linking to a site getting it penalized. Commonsense told me that is not viable...but seems Google has lost that quality. After reading the guidelines it is obvious this is the case.
Now every bad guy out there can kill the competition with a well targetted link campaign. To think that doesn't happen is welll... about as forward looking as not seeing that paid links would be a problem.
I posted without reading the guidelines because, well, I have never done anything that would necessitate it. Personally, after reading the guidelines, I'm more than a little steamed that according to Google myself and SeoPros, and judging by the grey bar on other SEM Org sites, are all spammers!
Why do we get different treatment than W3C? Sure we aren't as important, but... a quarter or two back several members were in the top ten, now only "removed" members and a few we would not list are placing for search engine optimization. At least two I know are buying links and two others are spamming directories. I know because some directories told me!
Thank you Google your guidelines undo all the work done by SEO/M organizations to get past the perception we're all a bunch of spammers and people of questionable ethics! That does so much to advance the Industry that was here long before Sergey and Company wrote the algo that expects the net to change to suit their myopic view of it.
The way that SEs have bootheeled this I personally find reprehensible! Afterall, SEs won't answer questions about the spec. All SEs really needed to do was file a "proper" RFC and then everyone would have worked together to implement it. There wouldn't have been innocents whacked for things they did before the Guidelines changed! Guys like me who believe the HTML spec should be changed by the governing body not a bunch of SEs that under the guise of their guidelines choose to add attributes to an element! Not because I don't think it is a good idea, but because YOU DON'T %^$# with that! it is bigger than SE's, webmasters and browsers, that's why there is a governing body so the interests of all are maintaned!
How can I not do things for SEs and use this non compliant tag which goes against a second rule of mine which is don't add needless attributes to programmed tags.
Another very big issue is that Google has chosen to decide what the ORgs intent was. I can assure you it was no different than the W3C! Personally I'm offended that anyone would think that I would manage a directory that sells PR by the lb.!
First of all I personally believe that buying links is stupid beyond belief! I'm so old school I think most of the link techniques touted out there are useless services that don't drive traffic or sales. Links are not a long term strategy partly because only an idiot doesn't see that technique is to some degree easily shut down by SEs. Just like blog spam and a host of other user generated and reciprocal links are.
Matt, tell me it aint so! Am I a stupid unethical spammer? According to Google I am!
Thanks Jeffrey, it's good to agree about those six directories. But is that all the directories you own? How about ewebdirectory.net? Or the hedonist directory at 0fx.info? Do you run those directories as well?
If those directories are yours too, is that a complete list, or are there other directories as well? Have I named them all?
"Now every bad guy out there can kill the competition with a well targetted link campaign."
Hey Terry. We do work hard (and I'm sure the other search engines do too) to try to prevent one site from hurting another site like this.
Hi Matt,
Those 6 directories that I named are the ones that my team actively works on.
I do own a number of general web directories that are pretty much abandoned. I haven't worked on them in at least a year, probably longer.
2 of them you've named. I can think of 3 others off the top of my head. I also own other websites that have niche directories as a component of the site.
Most of these abandoned directories were bought from other people. For instance, ewebdirectory.net was bought as part of a package. I never even accepted a single listing to the directory. The only reason it still is live is because I have left the site up as part of a contractual commitment from the purchase that no listings would be removed.
I understand. I was holding a few back (e.g. flexengine.com) as a check. :)
If you look at it from a search engine's point of view, we don't just see avivadirectory.com. We see that plus the other 9-10 directories. And 10 directories, one of which is an expired domain, starts to look a little more serious to us than just the one directory.
And then if you dig a little deeper on the expired domains aspect, we start to see things like concordmachamber.org. That used to be the Concord Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce, but now it does a 301 redirect to avivadirectory.com. Or fresnoearthday.org, which used to be about an Earth Day, but now does a 301 redirect to a section of avivadirectory.com. Or thingymabobber.com, which used to be... well, you get the idea.
Now I can try to step into your shoes and look at it from your point of view. Maybe you've been looking for high-quality domains that match the topics on avivadirectory.com. But try to look at it from a search engine perspective as well. We see expired domains redirecting to your site. We see double-digit numbers of for-pay directories, some of which request reciprocal links, at least one of which used to be a non-profit in a former life, and not many of these domains have contact info or other information to make it clear who is running all these directories.
From a search engine's perspective, some of these other factors affect how we assess the situation with avivadirectory.com. I hope that makes sense. I don't bear any ill will toward the domain, but all of these other factors do come into play.
Hi Matt,
I was reading your comments about aviva directory. I do not own aviva directory and have no affiliate relations with it. It just raised a question in my mind is why does it matter what other sites does the owner owns.
If a webmaster owns 10 Porn sites full of Ads, and Crap content and one good site .... will the good site be penalized if it links to those 10 ??
I think Jeff clearly stated that all of his directories are there in aviva to state that it is a part of the network.
Doesn't google does the same thing ? linking to gmail on the homepage and google scholar and others ?
Doesn't google direct its traffic from all other names such as google.co.in and others .....
Same idea, i have run directories in the past, and i have used alot of domains i bought to park them to get traffic to my directories because alot of those users end up discovering something new quality. Aviva's quality cannot be questioned.
I ran ewebdirectory.net and it was sold to aviva as a part of a contract along with bunch of other templates. It was I who put in the deal that the site must stay up as the links added in the site upon the review were permanent. Jeff kept his words and which i see now is putting him in trouble.
I have no relations to this business as i sold my only directory idk.in before google penalty and out of the business, but i do study closely everything that google does. Including Larry Page's Marriage articles.
Just a thought that you would want to reconsider or maybe advise me for future reference ...
is it wrong to park the domains to ur main site to move the traffic of the old site to this new site ? Because otherwise the domains get parked at sites like sedo and have their parking page .... Whereas i think that the commission earned by sedo is not beneficial for me rather than earning the traffic from that domain.
I'll appreciate if you answer this question and clarify a little more thanks.
-Syed
Hi Matt,
I never thought I'd say this to you, but thanks a lot!
I can't say that I entirely agree with you - these sites are not just run by myself, but by a whole team of people who work for me. From my point of view, it looks like I'm getting in trouble for being larger than a one-man show.
As for the redirects, I'm also a domainer. If I get a domain that has traffic, I simply redirect it to the relevant section of Aviva. In my opinion, this provides a better experience than the typical parking page used by domainers.
That being said, I take your words seriously. I will simply park all the redirected domains. I will divest myself of the directories that my team does not actively work on.
The point I'm most confused about: are you saying that a site can be hurt by the actions of other sites owned by the same person? I guess I just don't see how taking the above actions to remedy what you pointed out will make Aviva or Apahcinc any better.
Also, regarding Apahcinc, it almost seems like from what you say that there is nothing that can be done about it. I can't do anything about the fact that the domain used to be used for something else. Should I simply redirect the directory to a new domain?
I'm also not quite sure what is wrong with using privacy protection for domains. I work out of a home office. I'm somewhat uncomfortable making my home address public. Perhaps you could clarify what Google is looking for in this regard.
Finally, I'd emphasize again, that none of my directories require reciprocal links. That is a feature of the software, which used by tens of thousands of directories across the web.
Wow Matt, nice feedback we are getting here.
As another example, why is ewebpages.org penalised? That site is full of unique content and quality listings.
It has no sitewide links. I haven't checked for any redirected domains, but us webmasters have never seen it as a problem in googles eyes.
Jeffrey, you're absolutely welcome, and these are great steps.
My short answer is that if (say) we're checking out a spam complaint, we try to look at the whole picture. By itself, someone with private whois is no problem at all. But when someone is operating a lot of domains and it's hard to find any contact info and many of the domains have private whois information, that starts to look a little different. Add in a dash of possible link buying (e.g. NukedGallery, or I remember seeing apahcinc.org on the front page of Search Engine Guide with a bunch of other directories in their paid link section). And then when you find expired domains coming into the mix, it starts to look like a savvier person who is trying to do some unusual tricks and perhaps hide their identity or hide who is behind all those domains. Taken as a whole, the situation looks different than someone running a single mom/pop business on one domain.
In your case, I would recommend taking the chamber-of-commerce type expired domains and not redirecting them to avivadirectory.com. Park them if you want, but let avivadirectory.com stand on its own. After the domains are separated a bit, I'd do a reconsideration request for avivadirectory.com. You might want to make it ultra-clear on your submission pages that the reciprocal link is optional; phpLD doesn't do a great job of that by default.
Once you're happy with avivadirectory.com and its path toward reconsideration, then I'd turn to apahcinc.org. I believe it can regain trust in Google's index, but right now it's pretty thin in terms of original content, for example. Does that make sense? Those are the sort of steps that I would recommend.
Thanks again Matt. I can't begin to tell you how much this means to me! I've always wanted to make Aviva and Apahcinc outstanding directories, and recent events at Google have been a big blow.
I think that there is a lot of confusion in the directory community regarding Google, despite you having made a post about directories. Certainly, I know at least 2 dozen directory owners who are seriously committed to building a quality resource. It's great that you are helping out like this.
Hi Matt,
Is great that you take the time to answer our questions, tank you very much.
Out of curiosity could you please explain this situation?
This domain ask-dir.net is just a 301 redirect to ask-dir.com, the ask-dir.net shows PR6 and ask-dir.com shows PR4.
Another example www.diablodir.com (PR6) 301 redirect to www.diablodirectory.com (PR4).
(disclosure: I operate both domains)
Thanks in advance.
Cheers
Hi Matt,
After reading your last posts I must admit that many things became clearer from webmaster's point of view. It is great to see that you take time to answer all our questions (I didn't expected to be honest!)
Matt, as I'm sure you know, web directories are a bit different than any other websites in terms of purpose and finalities and I think Google should treat them a bit different than other sites (not special treatment, I mean)I'm glad to see that your comments brought a bit of light into this shady situation. Imagine yourself as an webmaster, running your site and one thay being hit by a penalty. You don't know why, you don't know what actually was wrong. This is why a lot of people can only speculate - "it might be this, it might be that...". All I would like to see it's a sort of communication between you as the main Search Engine and us, tiny webmasters.
It will also be extremly useful if you can work on a set of official or unofficial guidelines for web directories. I'm sure Jeff and other well trusted directory owners will be more than delighted to help you in setting up something like this. This way everyone will know for sure what is good and what is bad in Google's eyes. This way your job as a search engine will become much more simplified and our job as webmasters will be much more easier knowing what Google agrees and what disagrees.
Matt, I bet with you, in maximum one week all the serious directory owners will comply with your guidelines. Everyone understands who Google is and how much it could only benefit for your site to comply with Google's rules.
Google may benefit from quality directories as well as directories definatelly benefit from Google's traffic. It's a win-win situation for everyone. People just need to know your intentions in order to comply.
Regards,
Dan
Hi Matt,
Thanks a lot for your kind response and comments. if my "Georger Bush" words hurt you ,i apologise.it is great chance to find answers from head of Google's Webspam team.
Congrats Jeffrey, for rescue GG Ban.
maybe you could to start a campaign to reduce a bit "Editorial Site Review Cost" for who reading these words :))
Warmest Regards Matt thanks again.
Re the business of private whois... The mom & pop one domain outfit doesn't need it really but remember that each domain you add adds that much more junk e-mail to your inbox.
At the moment, I find myself with 30-odd domains and sinking under the weight of junk mail sometimes. And, no, you can't just add spam protection as it's very easy to lose legit enquiries if you do that.
I do see your point of it being possible to manipulate links once you get a reasonable number of domains but, really, to penalise people for using whois privacy isn't a sensible route to go.
For the record, I don't use domain privacy at the moment.
Hey Matt, here is a serious issue that I think you should take a look at. How is it that both www.index-it.net and www.index-it.net/blogs/blogs41.html have the exact same page rank and the exact same number of google backlinks? What is even more strange is that blogs41.html also has the exact same cache version as the homepage. But the cache version tends to switch back and forth sometimes. My theory is that this is the reason why my site was dropped from pr6 to 3. As I have not ever sold links for page rank on the site, I only link to a couple of sites that I own in the footer. Moreover, the site was never penalized and still shows up in the serps for most of the targeted keywords.
My other question regards relevance issues. What about sites in our own niche? For example, if I own jewelry.com which has a pr of 6 and I buy a text link on bluenile.com which is pr 7, and lets say I use the anchor text "ear rings" why should'nt I be allowed to receive any pr or serp benifits from that? Both sites are 100% relevant and it clearly would not affect search results.
The first step mentioned in the google guidelines is to "Have other relevant sites link to yours". If webmasters are not allowed to get links from sites which are relevant to their own site, whether those links be paid or not, where in the world does google expect us to get them from? There has to be some kind of leway in all of this.
I have done my best to obtain as many relevant links as possible to point to my site, now granted there are few that are not so relevant, but show me one major website on the internet that does'nt have a few irrelevant links pointing at it. I just feel that if a site does chose to sell text links and those links are relevant to the niche then nither site should be penalized for that.
And by the way, when will you be back the Seattle area?
My directory(thedirectoryzone.com) was penalized too and I don't know why!
Matt, I love my directory and I work on it every day to make it better. Today, I've removed from the footer all the links to my own related websites. Maybe that helps Google to see my directory with another "eyes".
I will not add the "nofollow" to my listings because that is considered as an insult by webmasters.
Just a quick question:
How about removing PageRank from the toolbar?
Thanks
Thanks Matt for all the info.
(I enjoy your vidoes by the way... more please!)
About 4 months ago I got involved in the selling of links. My site (a support chat site) is now becoming quite a financial burden and I owed it to my visitors to attempt to raise some money to keep it going.
So for about 3 months I had paid links on my site. This was all well and good until I discovered some rather dodgy porn sites appearing in those links.
This issue, along with my concern that my site would be delisted in google, and my feelings about adding to the problem of webspam, led me to drop all the paid links about a month ago.
I was also concerned about not being able to pass on trust to other support sites who really need it.
I've no idea if my site has actually been penalised (I've seen some strangeness with what I consider to be the best, most original pages on my site being PR0ed or dropped from the index though) but I've submitted a reinclusion request confessing all my sins anyway.
I've also managed to get some of my traffic generating incoming links changed to nofollow.
Now I can sleep at night, even if my site will probably collapse shortly when I run out of money. :'(
Long live google and relevant results!
I'm concerned about the subjectivity that seems to be used with the Aviva directory.
It's great that Jeffrey got a plan for reinstating the Aviva directory. It seems to me that the key to this was the one-on-one dialog with Matt. I realize that Matt doesn't have time to work with every site himself. This being the case, is each website going to be assigned a personal Google reviewer so that everyone can resolve their problems or does everyone have to just guess?
Hi Matt
Have read through a lot of blogs recently regarding the PR downgrade and am desperately trying to fathom out whether we are breaching the PR selling rule or not.
Our site www.property-abroad.com has always enjoyed a good google PR5 with a predicted PR7 then all of a sudden it was completely wiped out.
We are obvioulsy a property portal advertising properties, agents and property related resources worldwide.
What confuses me is that I don't know what I have done for if I did then I would surely correct it.
Sure there are advertisers who pay to advertise on our site for obvious reasons to reach the audience we serve but I am not aware of us blatantly selling links for PR purposes - if I am wrong then please tell me so I can put it right and regain my credibility with Google.
Any light you can shed on my dilema is very much appreciated.
If there is no advertising revenue many of the websites online will cease to exist , that is the reality .I know people personally who quit their day jobs to do SEO work and part of this business is getting paid links and ranking for their clients.
I agree there are many manipulations out there to make a profit.People buy traffic to drop their alexa rating to charge premium rates in their sites.People buy pr to charge a premium rate.But if that business owner is willing to put the money in obviously he is committed to offer a good service to surfers.
It is pretty obvious , redirecting domains ,buying signatures up in forums ,mass buying of links is not permitted .Is there a SAFE number of advertising we can buy?
I have a hosting company and although i was in top 10 of google I still want to expand my business so I bought a banner on a website that gets 20 million page views a month for $xxxx.00 per month.My site was solid pr6 for 2plus year and now is pr4.I bought 1 link an dgave the site 4 linsk from sites i own myself so i dont do much link building at all.Traffic and sign ups is what makes me money not the pr but I am sure this purchase is what got me dropped .The website that i purchased the link from was pr8 (www.eurekalert.org) the service i was promoting was Blog hosting.
So if you are going to reinclude a business who clearly broke all sorts of rules ,does that mean everyone else will get a break too?
I signed a 6 month contract for that link and it was live two months, i took it down because that was the ONLY link purchase i made in 2007 and my site fell to pr4 and went to the second page.So i have 'redeemed' myself .I submitted my reconsideration the day the pr dropped and again on November 4 when the link was removed.
Although this is my specific example , I write thsi for everyone because i am sure we all have our own stories.
"Hey Terry. We do work hard (and I'm sure the other search engines do too) to try to prevent one site from hurting another site like this."
Matt, this hardly makes me confident since it was recently mentioned in SearchReturn that back in 05 you said Google washed out 90% of paid links... yet, we are here having this discussion! All this to remove 10%? Isn't Google throwing out the baby with the bath water? IMO, the SERPs were better a months back, now I see the usual suspect listings pre-Florida are back!
IMO, when the bad guys can't beat me by buying and arranging links the bad guys will stoop to the next level on the slime scale! This kind of spam is absolutely impossible to detect unless SE's have the ability to know whether I, or, a competitor, submitted to some spammy directory selling links by the lb!
Or is this really about forcing AdSense down everyones throat in order to monetize our sites or support a NFP org? Sure we have a choice. A choice between a kick to the face or to the groin, either way it is painful or disfiguring!
In the case of SeoPros we can't link to any service but Member sites so... adCents is out of the question.
Why is it A ok for the W3C to link to not only irrelevent sites but sites that are of dubious quality which is according to Google Guidelines the criteria for penalties! Oh right, SE's could hardly penalize them for using a non compliant element attribute!
Why can the W3C do it and SeoPros can't? we are a registered NFP. I understand the directories could be a problem and I will be adding the tag to those, but the Members, no because SeoPros did not sell advertising. The penalties to SeoPros and other SEM Orgs is IMO, having a bias that is not only unfair but a slap in the face to all the Members and ORgs.
We are being judged based on Google's perception of the intent of our Members. Not ours, which IMO, is honorable. In fact in the discussion among the executive we thought the tag was not needed because we don't sell advertising!
The bottom line is what Googles perception of what paid links are and SEOs perception are divergently different. Links from SeoPros are not for sale at any price. When an SEO is listed on the site we not only are reviewing them pretty closely, **we are recommending them** and monitoring them to make sure they have maintained the techniques they were using when we reviewed them. Why should we use this tag (if this is really about intent of a link)it is contrary to what we are trying to do and definitely not OUR intention!
We definitely want to continue to raise the visibility of our Members, that is our mandate.
Any suggestions... the request form is unacceptable because SeoPros is guilty of having a differing opinion of what is paid and what isn't, not diliberately circumventing the guidelines!
So if someone pays for links that point to their competition, and that competition is us then Google just penalize us without a reason?
So Google have just handed everyone a weapon.
This doesn't seem right, or is it just me?
Netheo, not only paid, it would work with free spammy directories as well if they are asking for recips or selling links around the listings!
IMO, this solution will result in a bigger problem. But... what do I know I've only been watching the bad guys develop techniques for 14 years. One thing is for sure they will always choose the path of least resistamnce and IMO, this will be the choice all choose in the future!
Re: mike -
"As another example, why is ewebpages.org penalised? That site is full of unique content and quality listings.
It has no sitewide links. I haven't checked for any redirected domains, but us webmasters have never seen it as a problem in googles eyes."
Hi Mike, thanks for your interest in eWebPages. I'll guess that Matt might suggest that the current problem I'm having is unrelated to the content or our editorial policies, but possibly the result of my poor choices in advertising and promotion (bought links).
I've been actively working towards correcting the problem and reconsideration (having those links removed or nofollowed).
If I'm headed in the wrong direction maybe Matt can steer me in the right direction?
What about listings sites? I run a series of B&B and vacation rental listings sites myself (www.ourinns.org and others). Although there's a notional subscription charge I actively discourage people from paying it as it's really there to place a "value" on the site entries.
However, what about the holiday rental property sites that DO charge for all listings? Is google planning on putting them all down to PR0 in that they are "selling links"?
Logically, I'd say you would have to put all those that charge to PR0 yet on the other hand, that's clearly a nonsense.
And, no adding nofollow isn't an option in this case. Who would pay anything from $50 to $500 a year for an entry on these sites without having a "proper" link? Remember too that for the most part these are ordinary people advertising their properties on these sites.
As someone else said, this appears to be forcing everyone down the route of free sites. Yet, that's going to kill adwords dead in the holiday/vacation property listings business as most charging sites do a LOT of adwords campaigns: without the subscription income these programmes would end very, very quickly.
I purchased 550 keyword and geographic location domains about 3 months ago. I am currently working toward getting my own sites made, until then I have them parked with a parking service that links to auto dealers who pay for pay per click ads. Some of my sites went to number one on google for example www.metroplexchevrolet.com. as of today I cannot even locate my site with quotations "metroplex chevrolet". I do not know what happened, but I believe that I am not doing anything wrong. I work in th auto business and dealers are always paying for links and buying pay per clicks etc. to get their rankings up high. They will try every trick in the book. I bought some legitimate sites that were available that should be at the top in the rankings. I cannot believe that I cannot even find it now. What is the problem? There is not currently a dealer that is metroplex chevrolet why can't I use it as a top ranking directory? keywords and geographic locations should rank high. I have not bought or sold any links why is my site being beat up? I am using it to link to other chevy dealers in my geographic location as well as dealer services. As a matter of fact some of the dealers that come up in the results for metroplex chevrolet are not even in the metroplex!!!!! Some of the dealers on it are also the worst dealers in town sales wise. Boy are there issues. I am actually wanting to show the dealers the power of keyword and geographic location domains to the dealers. It just seems logical am I wrong??? Toyota does it.
Google is falling further and further behind in giving internet surfers what they want to see in their search results. First and foremost is the surfer. If they search using Google for "large green sacks" then Google should return results for "large green sacks"... It can, and does, return what it wants to return based on what it thinks about paid and unpaid links and the page rank etc. But is this the service the customer wants? People looking for large green sacks on Google will never find "www.largegreensacks.com - the worlds main manufacturer of large green sacks" - because Google doesn´t list it because it thinks it has paid for links... should Google penalise the site for this? NO it shouldn´t(everyone has to pay for advertising, buying links is another form of advertising and increasing popularity/brand awareness etc.).. Google even do it themselves. Mr General Public wants to see this site. Of course Google has to rank the results and there can only be one top spot, everyone understands this and everyone wants top spot. There has to be a method for obtaining the SERPS and each search engine is entitled to do it their own way, eventually the surfers will realise that they don’t always get shown what they want to see, they are only shown what the search engine wants them to see.. it is then up to them to make their choice about which search engine they use. More and more people are now using alternatives to Google and getting better results. With Google’s shortcomings in other areas such as cost per click advertising, Google ads and the very annoying "Unable to display results as this seems like an automated request" page that is shown regularly nit is only a matter of time until they bury themselves.
I pulled all the stats from a few of my sites that get 5000+ daily traffic ,these sites have been established 15+ months.I was shocked to see about 30% of my traffic is now coming from Microsoft.I have been #1 in microsoft in the past and still would get only 20 visitors a day because the user numbers were low.Now it looks like more users are jumping off the google ship.I have stats to prove if you want to see for yourself Mr.Google.
The sites are audio books and hosting companies.
Since there are so many questions being answered here, you might want to include the big one: "Can other webmasters hurt my ranking by reporting that I am selling links when in fact I am not?" Addressing that HERE might be appropriate.
To me, it's obvious that formatting links SPECIFICALLY to look unpaid, to try to get them to pass page rank so you can accept increased payments for them, is only gaming the search engines.
SEOs seem to take exception that there is such a thing as making paid links “for users not search engines” (meaning formatting paid links appropriately, so as to not pass page rank/game search engines).
Hi Dave,
Yes other sites can hurt you, not only by reporting you but by buying the links that are pointing to your site.
How does anyone know if a link has been purchased for them. If you have 3000 inbound links you can't keep checking them to see if any are paid.
The worst thing is when Google penalizes by either delisting you or throwing you back in the sandbox they don't tell you why.
You just have to keep putting in re-inclusion requests and just have a guess at what you've ( in their eyes ) done wrong.
Dear Matt Cutts,
I'm writing to you because I don't know what else I can do.
Early this year I trialled Text-Link-Ads as I wasn't making a lot of money with Adsense and other affiliate programs.
What a big mistake. This is the only reason I can come up with to explain why 3 of my sites just fell out of rankings. 1 of them has been completely de-indexed.
I have submitted 2 reconsideration requests in the last 5 months, and I'm still waiting for Google to respond.
What else can I do?
The websites are cricketindex.com, rugby-union.info, and thegolfclub.info
On the subject on text-link-ads, Matt. Why do they have the PR they do when THEY are the heavy weight in the manipulation of Google's SERPs?
Why doesn't Google take a top-down approach, rather that bottom-up?
Just wanted to post this as a warning if people approach you at your website asking to buy advertising and using gmail.com ,chances are they are google spies.I had a sara neza email me at a site ,she offered to buy paid links and i said no .Then came back with 'I have a big budget ,please sell me a banner'.I asked her price but didnt agree to sell and 7 hours later my website fell from pr6 to pr4.This is the dirty underhanded stuff they are doing.
I allowed people to send me free content that i posted on static pages ,back 7 months ago when i made the site.It is a free blog site and i have never SOLD any links.The only 6 links on the site homepage are belonging to my friends and 2 of my own.
The timing of this email I got and how fast my site dropped was all the proof i needed that there was a google sting happening on October 11.
I bought the domain http://www.googlecankissmyass.com
as soon as the holidays are over I will be opening it up to the public as i sure there are thouands of webmasters who would like to have these discussions without using a google platform.It will be very popular once all the evils of this comapny is exposed.
Merry Xmas Matt
marina5000, loosen that tin-foil hat buddy!
Dave I had a successful business built up and expanded in 2006.I had 20-50 pr5-pr7 websites i never used for selling links or any sort of advertising.I didnt need the money personally so i hired first a girl in India and gave her a generous 50% of revenue .Then in july 2006 I offered a job to my niece here in canada to do the links and blog postings because we were doing so well.My own niece based her house purchase on the money she was making with me .Then big daddy google looked to us as next target,afterall the revenue we made was meaning our customers are not purchasing adwoords.ALL my customers want is to be in google results ,whats the difference if they spend $3000 a month buying links with different webmasters or give it all to google?
In my case I stopped all my link sales and i give my niece $200 a week towards her morgage payment.The girl in india was terminated about a month ago.So real lives have been affected by these things and for what?
My own website www.iseekblog.com was pr6 for almost 2 years,this year was first time i bought a link for it and it was a pr9 and it went live sept 4 ,2007 .October 11 it was made pr4 but i dont care about the pr.At $1900 a month the pr9 was a big cost ,but the site has 24 million page views a month and that was the reason i bought it , to get exposure to my website.
This is A FREE BLOG HOSTING COMMUNITY ,any links were given for free or i own the sites.
Now you cant even find me in top 100 for the words i ranked in top 10 for at least 1 year.
In my case google seen the pr9 and assumed my rank was artifical , if they bother to check the cache on the pr9 site they would have seen my ad was 1 month old when they crucified my site.
Yes i have done the reinclusion for the site but still nothing.
RE: "whats the difference if they spend $3000 a month buying links with different webmasters or give it all to google?"
Google has no objections to anyone buying advertising on other sites. What is requested from Webmasters is, if you sell/buy links that pass PR, use nofollow (or some other method)else you may loose trust in Google's eyes.
I want to make a feature suggestion to Webmaster Tools and this is the most appropriate place so i hope it gets read.
Please make an option when viewing your inbound links in WT to only show the Homepage URL from domains that have a sitewide to your site.
For example, if someone has a 100,000 page website and decides to place a sitewide link to you it completely "fills" the link report making it impossible to go through.
I enjoy checking backlinks to see what other sites are saying about mine, but it's impossible to sort through the data if you have a couple of large sites link to you sitewide.
Thanks.
Hohum! What I can see clearly here is that CONTENT IS no longer the KING! just my two cents
p.s. of course Im also drowning
Thanks, Matt, for some interesting info. It certainly helps us to keep out of trouble...
After years as a pro SEO it never ceases to surprise me that so many people think Google and the other engines owe them a living.
Google doesn't say that paid links are bad, it simply says that it doesn't want to use them in its organic rankings - so please could we label them 'nofollow'. They're not saying that you have to do it, they're just saying that if you don't, and they consider your site to be amongst those muddying the waters of organic SERPs, then they reserve the right to do what seems appropriate to ensure that their own index only contains results which are ranked organically. They are not touching your site, they are changing their algo, filters and index.
If you don't like the way Google works, then optimise for Yahoo or MSN. If you are right, and Google is not a good engine, then people will vote democratically with their feet and start to increase the search market share of these other engines.
Just get over it and build better sites instead of buying links. That's the whole point of organic SERPs: they are supposed to return the sites people want to find, not the sites that want to be found.
I think that the underlying problem is that the origins of google's algorithm are effectively an automated way to rank things similar to academic articles. There you never had the problem of people paying for references (ie links), or at least not quite so openly (the final couple of authors on papers are often there just so that they can get a "publication").
Move on 10 years and, yes, money does come into it. Just ignoring paid links isn't sensible in an Internet which is, these days, largely commercial.
Adding "nofollow" in attempt to effectively negate advertising does not seem to be a sensible way to go. This action on their part is just going to push it "underground". Chances are that you'll see more blogs put out by companies with very subliminal type advertising. It's still advertising though and it's still going to distort the results in google's algorithm.
What they really need to do is to allow for advertising in terms of paid links. Just putting their head in the sand isn't going to be a long term solution to this yet that's exactly what they appear to be doing at the moment.
Come on guys: update the algorithm to allow for a commercial Internet.
“What kind of society isn't structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system”
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
“Capitalism and communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this: The communist, seeing the rich man and his fine home, says: 'No man should have so much.' The capitalist, seeing the same thing, says: 'All men should have so much.'”
“Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.”
A Simple solution to Google: Google Adsense code must be show the direct hyperlink like http://www.site.com . (Not like: http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/iclk?sa=l&ai=Bq6dBP41....&adurl=http://www.SITE.com%3Faid%&client=ca-pub-xxxx7609&nm=7)
In this situation nobody buy links. Everybody go adwords to buy link placement.
Google, it's users. Webmasters and shareholders are MUCH better off when pages are ranked in an objective manner as apposed to subjective.
If want money influenced rankings, use PPC search engines.
Dave, no way, no how, does paid links make results any better or worse, sure you can find examples, but IMO, they don't really prove much. I'm sure lots of people can show exam[ples of paid linking helping results. IMO, if the subjectivity you allude to is based on skewed judegement then... the result is worse.
When reciprocal links and free directories ruled the results were no better in fact if you were looking for products they were even more skewed with useless sites that just pointed at sites that sold the product.
The only difference now is the sites that are doing most of the pointing are Google partners and SEs profit, IMO, that's really what this is about
Personally I'd rather pay google or someone direct than have to pilot a myriad of MFAs and re-sellers.
SEOs who say paid links ... are anything other than another promotion method are living in the 90's wakeup it's 2007 because you're buying the SEs propoganda! The playing field has been forever slanted and there is no going back!
Terry,
"Personally I'd rather pay google or someone direct than have to pilot a myriad of MFAs and re-sellers."
Then use Adwords and bid for the top position. Also, only look at the AdWords when searching. That IS a glimpse of what the "organic" results *would* be like if paid links are seen as votes.
What this about is what Google is built on, which ALL their profits flow on from. That is, relevant and objective organic results. Not results ordered in favor of those with the deepest pockets.
IF Google are wrong and you are correct, they will not be the number 1 SE in the World for much longer.
My money is still on Google (armed with facts we will never know) knowing what is best for;
1) Their users.
2) Shareholders
3) Webmasters
At present I CAN compete with the likes of MS and other BIG business in the organic SERPs. If paid links are used to pass PageRank, I (and all others) wouldn't have a snow balls chance in hell.
I'm sorry but you people are obviously completely oblivious to the fact that we are oblivious to your latest crack downs. You zeroed my page rank, I've just checked only because I read this entry by chance! Yes I advertise selling links but I have no current customers! To fit within your rules I have to do extra work on my site which hasn't earned me a thing for months and since I access the computer through a knee switch scanning system since I have a disability it will take me much longer than a normal person! I'm not happy! Besides which a lot of people sell SEO links, you have cost the industry millions! OK I don't know the figure, it may not be that much. I suppose that the people purchasing such links will have that money freed up for adsense, right? The black hats will just sell links privately so I think that the quality will last. A part of me agrees with this policy but a chance to fix my site before you penalized it would have been appreciated. Very disappointed in Google!
I actually read through the whole thing... wow a lot of information which I am not sure i have all digested yet. However couple things that come to my mind...
First Google is a business and thus their first priority is always to protect their business and that means they will do anything it takes to make their search results as relevant as possible, as most other parts of their business rely on that. And no Google has no responsibility to any other website.
I guess at this point I should say that in my sites have been gaining PR in the last month or so... However I do not agree with Google about the rel=nofollow thing at all. Now it is Google's right to make up any rules it wants to make your site be included in it's index, just like I have the right to make any rules I want for any of my sites. But the problem I see with the rel=nofollow is that first it is not a standard, and second there are a lot of people providing great content sites and blogs that do not even care about SEO and would never even be informed that they might have to use this weird little attribute Google requires to be compliant if the link could be interpreted to be paid for by the receiver of the link. Now this makes me want to tag every link on all my sites with rel=nofollow, just in case because I have no idea what Google might or might not consier a "bad"/"paid" link. What if all webmasters everywhere did this set that attribute to all links? Then Google would have to come up with another attribute or some other wacky thing you now have to add to the link... Who has time for all this? I know I don't. If Google continues to require webmasters to "comply" to the way they want the webmasters to behave then Google will soon become another failed search engine just like the ones they replaced back in the day...
Lets see how much I can get some short options on Google... I guess I can make money as they crash and burn on the market to offset any potential losses on lost page rank. Hedging your bets is always a good idea. Which reminds me about some comments earlier about people who said something about family who loved writing and relied on Google results solely for their success. You know you never should place all your eggs in one basket, specially when it comes to the internet.
Oh and finally one request I have to Google is that I see all these "directories" as basically useless spam. The only people that go to those sites are people who want their sites included in order to gain PR from them (myself included), why don't you just drop all their PR to 0 and delist them and mark them so that no site gets any benefit out of them. The only exception are few directories which are very specific to their niche where they have only maybe few hundred sites that are all related to their niche, but when you have these directories that list sites from all categories nobody ever actually uses them, including dmoz. I have never actually gone to dmoz to find a site, like I said delist them all and then review them individually to be include back in the directory.
For those of you who do not like what Google is doing: Make a new search engine that provides more relevant results and overtake Google, it is not impossible. Or find alternative search engines to focus your optimizations on and ask people to use those instead of Google.
Blogger Guy, checkout Bill Slawski's Blog on Search Patents.
A new search engine is becoming harder to do as the intellectual property portfoio being created by the big three and purchases by Yahoo! and MSN of AltaVista and Fast means the next big thing will come from one of them or someone who develops algos or hardware that are even more revolutionary than PageRank.
What they can't do with patents they'll do by simply taking webmasters out behind the barn and "boot stomping" webmasters into adopting policies like "breaking code" to stay in business. That the webmasters fold like a cheap lawnchair is what I find puzzling. In the past we skoffed at them!
There has been little real action because there is a big faction of webmasters and marketers that the elimination of paid links provides them great benefit. Isn't giving them that benefit like the FTC penalizing brick and mortar stores for buying TV advertising when most of their competitors can't. The Net has not been a level playing field since the Fortune 500 decided the NET wasn't a fad but a huge trend.
Google has destroyed the oldest monetization method on the net, their PageRank is also responsible for changes in citation linking because in the old days we linked to all sites with no regards for the other site beyond it's value to our users. Now webmasters have to consider the consequences of SEs algorithmic changes... so why bother risking providing a complete list of resources and references... instead they decide to stick to only those it appears SE like. So... the bottom line is the strong get stronger and the new and "under known" remain so longer. Google in particular have affected the way reciprocal linking is done. In the past the criteria was mainly "is it useful to my users", now I couldn't link to a site handing out $10 bills simply because that would be "in the eyes of G" an irrelevent link possibly penalizing my site for sending users to a site handing out $10 bills! IMO, that's whacked and is adversely affecting everyone!
Google has attempted to cloak this smackdown in relevance and result quality but it could really just be about SEs limiting webmasters choices for monetizing their projects. I mean if you can't sell links, what are the options?
Should I have to break my code to stay in business... seems so. If my code is broken it should be because I think it is not that important not that SE told me to do it!
RE: "I mean if you can't sell links, what are the options?"
Only about 10000001 other options. Anyway, Google has never said Webmasters cannot sell links and/or advertising.
Hi Matt,
Thank you very much for your insight into the directory related issue. Much appreciate as ever.
Blogger Guy has come up with something that many of us have been thinking about but which Google haven't seemed to consider ie that many people could feel that they need to add nofollow on ALL links.
In fact, I have already done that on my blogs and listings sites simply because it's just too difficult to go through the entries manually and add nofollow when there's a payment involved. I'm quite sure that many others have done the same, particularly on blogs as there seems to be no easy way to automatically add nofollow to historic posts even if you've all of the paid ones in a single category.
One piece of advice that any new blogger will now take up is that nofollow needs to go in so Google can pretty much forget about blogs being any use in their pagerank calculations in future.
I run what is effectively a small group of nice directories (www.ourinns.org) and argueably they would be "safe" in Blogger Guy's view. Yet, I don't KNOW that they'll be safe and therefore they too have nofollow added.
So, in "protecting" their business interest, Google appear to be in the process of throwing away the entire basis of it ie pagerank. In fact, I suspect that this has created an opportunity for someone to come in with a new search engine which recognises that money is used in the Internet these days and therefore write something that doesn't need to bother with any nonsense like nofollow.
I'm quite sure that someone is beavering away on that already somewhere. Whether it'll be someone in Yahoo, Microsoft or just an ordinary Joe we'll find out in a couple of years.
This domain speaks for itself -
googlepageranksucks.com
BTW it's on sedo and ebay!
RE: "googlepageranksucks.com"
They have to say that as they don't have any and they are selling the domain, LOL! History proves otherwise :)
Hi,
I found this blog very helpful and read many articles. I was looking for something that i could not find and i would like to ask you.
My website had a Google PageRank of 6 that decreased to 5 during recent update of page ranks by google.
I want to know that what should i do to make my page rank increased instead of decreasing it?
Moreover, what factors might have effected my site's page rank? If you can indicate some factors, i may avoid them in future. And if there is something that i can do to improve my page rank, please tell me.
Thanks for your help.
Google does not follow link having attribute rel="nofollow". What about links where attribute is rel="external" ?
Does google follows it?
Two problems:-
1.What happens if your site appears in a spam directory who only charge $2 a year - competitors will pay this for sites they do not own, as for the price of a coffee they can kill off competition.
2. e-mails and letters from a directory insisting you pay them £100 for a paid link that you never wanted. When iyou tell them to remove your site, as it could hurt your rankings, they insist it will only be removed until you pay them an administration fee!- i'm not sure how common this scam is however i can see it growing as many will pay just to get them off their backs and not risk losing all their organic results because they are wrongly accused of buying links.
Silverstall, the worse Google will do is discount incoming links. Trust me, incoming links can only bring you traffic and never effect your rankings.
Hi Dave and i hope you are right although what concerns me is that googles guidelines state 'selling' and 'buying'. If it just said selling then i would agree with you 100%. Maybe its just me but the addition of 'buying' implies a penalty more severe than merely discounting the links.
Yes if I were a blackhat I'd just go buy links on sites I know Google is penalizing who they link to. The only scenario I can't do that is if the link vendor is vetting requests. Presto an IBL that can hurt you? So... "never affect your rankings" is not something I'd trust anyones word on. Matt says as much above when I questioned the "buying". To my knowledge this is a first and IMO, will be abused in the same manner as the link buying problem it is meant to correct.
Silverstall, those who buy links for PR are already penalizing *themselves* by paying for something they will likely never get. I.e PageRank. Those that buy for traffic only will get what they pay for. I.e click traffic and no PageRank.
Matt Cutts has said as much on his personal blog a few times.
Trust me, Google are NOT that silly to allow such a huge gaping exploitable whole in their in prized algorithm that is the envy of all other SEs. If they were, they wouldn't be the most popular SE on the Planet and one of history's most successful companies.
@Dave Hawley
Paid links were around before the prized algo so... they aern't so smart that they are infallable. Their APIs and map programs have been hacked... so Google isn't so smart that they don't make mistakes.
You seem to be saying that although they say they are going to penalize buyers they won't, why bother including buyers if they don't intend to do it?
Their own guidelines say they are penalizing link buyers so... are they misleading us? It is also very evident that not all paid links are not passing PR so... your points are not supported by fact, it's more of a misguided belief Google can do no wrong.
"Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results."
Oh if only that were true, any search for "page title site name" shows my site back in positions 30-100 and a number of blogs, forums and websites who have mentioned my site and the article, and even linked to it as well coming up before me.
Question Matt, what is the most relevant result to display for a "page title site name" query?
Of course that's right, the PR5 article on my site with all the links pointing at it, not dozens of sites that mention it.
Do this query with thousands of my pages and you get the same result, that's a sloppy search engine.
Why did my visitors drop from 13,000 a day to 200 a day in 5 minutes and loose thousands of rankings? Was it because of the 3 non-paid sitewide links on my site?
Ok i roll over, i need to eat and missing out on $400 a day for the last 3 weeks has taken it's toll.
I have removed the link to my friends site, the link to the theme maker but i can't remove the link to the script maker because that parts encrypted.
So have have 1 link on my site now, i hope this is good enough for you sir. Please review my re-inclusion request before i loose my car, PC i'm paying off and allow me to eat and sleep without worry.
This really is heartbreaking, Thanks Matt!
Carly, I'm in the same position as you just not on such a high scale.
I went from 500 a day to 10 a day at 12.30 pm UK time on september the 6th.
There's no reason, and I can't find out why because Google don't do human responses.
I thought traffic was suppose to increase when your site got older.
I take it yours has never returned netheo?
That's what i am very afraid of also, the worst part is i left my job on the Friday (25th Jan) to dedicate to being a full time webmaster because my site broke the $400 a day a few days running.. Less than 48 hours in to my role of full time webmaster Google pulls the plug on me leaving no income to support my children or myself.
I guess more fool me thinking Google can be trusted, it cannot it seems.
As a web user, ever since this paid link war search results are getting worse all round and this is putting my site and experience aside.
Matt, i do not care about Pagerank and i think it's pretty stupid and shouldn't exist. I will do a trade, take my hundreds of PR5/4/3 etc pages and make them Zero and restore my sites place in the index.
It will do us both a favor, you will have a more relevant "Search Experience" for Google's users and i won't be awake at 3am tearing my hair out trying to work out how many weeks/days i can survive if my site doesn't come good or even if my reinclusion request will be read.
I wouldn't be surprised if nobody bothers to even look at it.
I hope you site comes good netheo, i have come across a "lot" of people recently who have had the exact same thing happen. Mine seems to be one of the more severe cases, but nobody can find a solution.. Not even some of the SEO industries household names who have checked my site.
No Carly, my site hasn't returned.
The strange thing as well was it happened before the last PR update, and when it updated my site stayed at PR 4. My site was just instantly made supplemental or sandboxed for some reason.
I get the odd long tale search on the first page but everything else is on pages in the hundreds.
I wasn't ready to go full time but the site was paying bills. I worked on it every day for 2 years.
I've put in 3 re-inclusion requests just guessing on what might have been the problem but you don't know what's happening because they don't answer you.
I'd gladly pay $10 for a 2 minute consultation into the reason why my site was sandboxed/sent supplemental.
I had a having a row with someone at Squidoo for about a week leading up to my site dropping, and I always thought they might have said something to Google.
Good luck with your site Carly, I think mine is gone forever.
RE: "your points are not supported by fact, it's more of a misguided belief Google can do no wrong."
More like common sense based on THE facts. Which is what ALL SEO is about. Webmasters can ONLY control who they link TO and not who links to them.
There are no victims in link buying & selling schemes, only volunteers.
Hi,
How can I add the nofollow tag to a specific category (label) of my blogger blog?
Thanks,
i am having many sites and doint well in search engine. When first time i heard that google is going to stop link purchasing and selling i was socked. But i go through whole articles and details posted on Google guidelines and blog. i devote more time by studing why google is doing this, and finally conclude that it is good for us. as Google is trying to improve quality of search result. i really appreciate this effort.
Tech News
Jigs
I agree jignish that the link selling has to stop. Millions of Splogs are published every week with the intent of skewing the organic results or making money off the backs of original authors. Too many webmasters are more concerned about making money than creating original content. If the spammers and links sellers win it will ultimately drive people away from using the internet. The irony is the less you focus on making money the more money you will make. Do you think the creators of myspace, flickr or facebook wasted energy on creating hundreds of splogs or buying 1000's of links - no - instead they focused all their energy on making something unique which in turm produced a million times more revenue than anyone would hope to achieve from splogs or selling/buying crappy links.
Hi Matt, what ever way you look at it ,google introduced the green bar beast and now have to live with it,at the very least there should be a contact with the site owner for any deemed infractions to the tos, google owes it to all those webmasters out there that they would at least be contacted before being stripped,,.
i personally dont see the value in the toolbar pr other than it being a snapshot of what google thought of your page at a certain point in time,with sites with low pr ranking up there with high pr for terms
On another matter how does google view the practice of, for example, i am setting up a blog which provides free lessons in web design,photoshop etc,i have bought a live site/domain which has been around for a few years providing the above services with the intention of further developing the site,i have since decided on a different domain name and was thinking about a 301 for the purchased live domain/site to the new domain, would this be ok in the eyes of google ?
So what if your competition, who has deep pockets, decides to buy links to your website to destroy it?
matt dude - is it "rel=nofollow" or rel="nofollow"
i guess rel="nofollow" right!
Estas directivas son claras y no queda mas que adecuarse, yo de por si voy a revisar todas las paginas web que administro para ver que cumplan a cabalidad las directivas de Google no me queda de otra.
saludos
Hi,
http://www.hoteljorena.it/
Please look at the bootom of the page, there are some small icons with links.
I would like to know if links like this can trigger a google penalty
Best Regards,
Cristiano
Hey-
What do you say about these all paid directories available in internet?
is it good or bad?
Dear Sir,
I have been maintaining two blogs for quite some time
http://ooty-all-about-ooty.blogspot.com/
and
http://my-roadtrips.blogspot.com/
Please do visit it and let me know how to improve the page ranking. I have not got any page rank so far. How do I contact people who will link my website.
Regards
please help me. My website has been there for more than mth but google has not indexed it
Http://gmat-preparation.blogspot.com
i bought some dropped domains last year and since october were banned from google.I took content and put on brand new domains and the new sites now are caching and pr2-pr4.SO ANYONE WHO HAD BAD HABIT OF ME TO BUY DOMAINS THEN PUT NEW CONTENT ON BECAUSE OF PAGE RANK -save your money and just stop lol
How does one go about finding out what penalty has been incurred? I have that was doing great and then dropped off the rador. I have not done anything spammy on purpose. It's a Wordpress blog. I did have a database problem and had to role the site back about 3 days. Started to have my traffic fade away right after that.
For those of us who want to play by the rules, how do we find out what rule Google thinks we violated? I have no clue!
If Google would make this a little more cut and dried, it would sure be helpful.
Or, cound it be due to the site being rolled back, changing the time stamp on the pages?
Any thoughts?
Steve
It has been several weeks since I removed a 3-way links page, which was a violation, but the penalty is still on my site. I did not get any benefit from the 3-way links page so I had actually already removed the page when Google penalized my site. I was listed at number 6 before I put up the 3-way links page, and dropped to 67 after the penalty was applied.
Matt, how long after a webmaster has corrected the violation to Google Webmaster Guidelines does the penalty remain on the site?
Julie
thanks for the information :D
google index are confusing, sometimes I get indexed sometimes not, I saw a blog full of spam links with better ranking than my page with original content, this is bullshit.
I agree with Piptopia - I have experience it lately. My post is almost 2 weeks old but it still don't appear on Google SERPS. And sometimes it only takes a day or two to land on Google SERPS. How and why?
Matt,
I have been having a terrible experience with Google. For example, I had a website up that was replete with rich content, which had taken me hours to write, and a book mark of one of my pages had a higher position on the search engine than my website!
Moreover, I put up a squidoo lens that had well over 2000 words in it. It was one of the best articles that I had written. It was getting hundreds of visits a day, and then it was knocked into orbit, and even took the backseat to an empty bookmark.
Even worse than that, I submitted an article to Ezine articles. Someone took the article and put it on their site, and added links to it that were not a part of the original article.
I made a complaint about this to Google and Google removed my article from their index and left the one that was in violation of my copyright up.
I am really trying to follow your rules, but it doesn't seem to work.
I have decided to really sit down and study the rules. I am going to follow them down to the very last detail. In other words, I am going to put Google to the test. I hope that I won't be disappointed again.
Let's say that I buy a website whos previous owner has been exchanging links.
In a visit to a forum I found out that the exchange was also done with non related websites.
Should I expect google to penalize the site for this?
or
Will google just ignore the non related links and keep the current pr of the website?
As a matter of fact...there is a website like this that I like very much and was considering buying, but am holding back until I know that there is no problem.
If I can expect a penalty...Is there anything I can do to avoid it?
Thanks very much in advance for your reply
cool http://www.e7lam.com
I like and agree with the crackdown on paid links. It leaves a doorway for a little guy to enter the market as hugh corporations could just buy their way to the top.
Now all I have to do is keep my content in quality condition and rely on my naturally occuring links. I have 2 PR6 sites just by simply doing what Google asks, why would I change?
I believe in the buying and selling stance, being a long time web site owner. I do on some of my websites sell links for traffic but do include the "nofollow" as i do believe in keeping the search engines as clean as possible...
My main site http://www.buyers-web.com got effected by this same issue in the past so i am hoping some pagerank passes back soon, now that i have done and implemented all these changes.
Timon Weller...
I don't know if it was a direct response to this post, but I noticed that the "Supporters Program" page on the W3.org has a meta "nofollow" tag, which nofollows all links on the page. I don't know if you all noticed that when claiming that they have some sort of special status, but that negates any link value from sites listed on the page. Just a heads up :)
AFAIK. The "nofollow" meta is new or at least no one including I picked it up at the time. Interesting that they chose to use the meta rather than the href? Could mean they don't agree with Google's use of the href attribute or it could be that they couldn't use the href version because it's not valid HTML.
I think google shouldn't banned blog or website who sell links. What I'm trying to say is, How you identify that it was a paid link or not???
So Matt are pay for performance affiliate links that use naked link technology (like those found through www.linkconnector.com or similar technologies) ok for SEO?
The person is only being paid if the link converts. So in this case, it seems like if the link isn't relevant, the publisher would pull it because it wouldn't convert. But I can see where this is a grey area (no pun intended) so I was wondering what the official Google stance is on these kind of links where the link is not specifically paid for but there is financial consideration.
It seems similar to a directory submission in some ways from the standpoint that it is not a direct payment for a link, but at the same time, the two cases are very different so you can't really draw any conclusions.
Your advice would be very helpful as I am advising a Fortune 100 company on this strategy and I want to make sure they don't inadvertently do something that makes them the next BMW ;)
Thanks!!!
Geez. I am just about to start learning all this stuff. Lots of warnings around I saw.
I want to believe this is all true, but my site has droppped slowly from a PR4, to PR3, to PR0! I have concentrated for a year on unique relevant content. I have been trying to back link with sites that are popular with the same theme. Now I'm dropping down the rankings on Google. I want to pull my hair out!
Your advice would be very helpful as I am advising a Fortune 100 company on this strategy and I want to make sure they don't inadvertently do something that makes them the next
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