Google is now attacking a link building strategy that incorporates using paid blog networks where one writes one article then submits it to a service that posts that article with the embedded backlinks to hundreds or even thousands of sites in their proprietary blog network. Google admits most of their new penalties are using manual research and algorithm overrides in order to deindex or penalize sites using the service. Of course, they are deindexing the sites that sell such services.
Google is sending out warnings that go something like this:
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.YourAccusedSite.com/,
We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
I think Google has a hard row to hoe in front of them with this Big Brother with a big stick assault on webmasters. It’s clear what they are doing is signing up for these services, then finding out where those sites are in the network, then with their trojan horse technique, they are deindexing those sites from a manually generated list. They are hoping that they only have to do this to a few sites, then others will stop the practice out of fear it will happen to them, thus creating an example of them and getting others to take down their sites. So the snowball effect will kill the practice and the industry.
The biggest flaw in this monopolistic Google attack is that all you have to do to destroy your competition is to submit an article to one of these blog networks containing backlinks to your competitor’s site and viola your competitor is penalized or deindexed without doing anything against Google’s policies. Therefore, I think there is going to be a backlash for Google’s reckless deindexing of people’s sites.
Google penalizes you for doing exactly what they do; in fact, they are hurting you by emulating their business model. Google survives on their paid backlinks network called Google AdWords, so Google is hypocritical trying to hurt the little guy while doing the exact same thing they are accusing others for. Google is notorious for surrounding organic search with their paid links network. They even try to make the paid AdWords links appear like part of the regular organic search by putting those paid links at the top of the page in line with the natural search below it. This wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t a monopoly, but I get 95% of my search traffic from Google. This makes me want to fan the flame to any alternative sources of traffic like other search engines and social media.
Even though Google makes subtle changes in their paid search links above the natural search, many of my clients are fooled by them thinking those ads are part of the natural search. Even though I have gotten their site to position one on page one, the client still points out that Google’s paid links network is outranking their number one spot.
Google has been caught buying paid links to artificially boost their own websites in a Google search. Then, to add salt to the wound, they said they would penalize the rogue group at Google for doing so, but the self-imposed penalty only lasted for a brief 60 days.
Other invasions of privacy are standard practice for Google even though they are in violation of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they don’t care, for them, they use those sacred documents for toilet paper. In fact, they’ve submitted a patent to secretly listen to all your cell phone calls to learn your likes and dislikes to target you for ads for even more profits. This is clearly a violation of many laws, but what does Google care, privacy is a joke at Google. Their closeness to American Intelligence agencies is alarming as well. God only knows how much information they sell to the government. This revolving door relationship may be the reason Google is able to skate the law.
Big G can throw billions of dollars into their legal department to ensure their violations can proliferate without restraint. Even Congress and the governments of other countries were appalled when it was revealed that Google was going around the world collecting personal data from your wi-fi signal at your house. When caught, they said it was an accident…sure. So far, the courts have only fined them $25,000 for this but not for stealing your data, but for their delays in responding to the court's inquiries.
For a long time, Google ran ads across the bottom of copyrighted music videos and movies to make a profit off of other people’s’ talent without paying them a dime in royalties on their YouTube site.
Google lost a lawsuit in France for hurting a business for artificially boosting sites that called their company a scam in the Google search results. As an online reputation manager, I’ve been very concerned with Google manipulating their search results and hurting innocent companies in the fray.
Google tracks your searches even when you leave Google sites and they save that history which can be used against you in court. Some people refer to this as the Google Supercookie. In fact, the previous CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, admits it in a CNBC interview and says you should never search for anything that might cause a red flag. Of course, the excuse to invade your privacy is coupled with the trite phrase, ‘what difference does it make if you have nothing to hide’, but who is Google to decide when they violate everything they condemn their users for?
I think in the end, Google will back off hurting sites that they allege use paid blog networks for link building because it’s too easy to destroy your competition beyond their control by using blog networks to build links to your competitor’s sites. After this rash practice develops enough backlash, they will only penalize or deindex the sites selling those services.
On a good note, Google has revealed that they have a weakness in their algorithm that can’t automatically detect and filter links in a blog network without sending an employee in to manually pick apart these networks. Secondly, they revealed that they consider these links powerful enough in SEO optimization to go after them in this unprecedented way, so links integrated into ample content are likely very powerful to boost the ranking of a site that one links to. It may serve you well to create your own private blog network since they’ve made it obvious that those links are valuable for SEO.
No comments:
Post a Comment