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Gaming Google In The Gaming Industry

Have you ever looked at the top of the search results for your industry, seen successful, clearly off-guideline strategies working for some seemingly inferior site and thought, "WTF!! Why hasn't Google caught these guys?"

If you never have had that reaction, you probably need to pay closer attention to what your competitors are doing, because the more competitive the search, the more likely there are players successfully gaming the results.

Here in the US, with the gaming (ie. gambling) industry preparing for the legalization of online casinos in some states, the searches associated with the most valuable keywords are set to become super competitive - you would think (incorrectly) that they already are and have been for years. What's really changing is the importance of the USA geo component for the longtails. We know these searches are valuable because this is one of the fields that gets plenty of enforcement action from Google, and at the same time, plenty of black hat activity that goes undetected for long periods of time. What's really surprising is the low bar for entry in these searches.

Take this search: "online slots usa"

Since the results will very likely have changed by the time you read this, here are some screen shots from 23 March 2013: (click for larger views)

Note that positions #3 & #6 are held by two urls from .edu sites. Anytime you see a school domain ranking very high in a gaming search, that's usually a sign of a successful rank insertion. Look more closely and you'll see these are single pages, not websites. Even closer and you'll see they're supported with hidden links from other school related (possibly hacked) sites.

Here are the one page casino affiliates that the clicks reveal: (click for larger views)

The top of this search is actually very weak in terms of link numbers. The reason for this is that Google's enforcement actions killed off the sites with huge numbers of links with the advent of Penguin. The #2 site has only 8 links from only 4 domains (Majestic), and the #1 site has 450 links but from only 3 domains!

The #3 rank is supported by, among other things, only 15 links from only 8 domains (according to Majestic), some of those links are on http://www.inspiringteachers.com/, a seemingly innocent site. A look at their source code shows 2 sets of hidden links with this structure (for clarity we removed all but the money link):

We can also see that by hovering over the links to the casinos involved, that the affiliate code associated with these urls is the same - it's the same entity that achieved both of these results.

This is impressive. These are big money terms, and from our experience, at a minimum this is probably worth a 2-5 grand per month in affiliate income. So there's plenty of motive here, and if you can keep this rank or keep swapping out pages as they get discovered & penalized, it's clearly worth some dev expense to keep these balls in the air.

What's really counter intuitive is the small number of links it took to pull this off - this is clearly a link driven insertion, since the content is no way going to hold this rank on its own. But using only 8 domains?

If you think that's surprising, take a look at this next example. Here is the top of the search for "online slots" as of today:

This is NOT the geo search - this is the global search for online slots. Using link data from Majestic, the #1 url, http://www.freeslots.com has 11,065 links from 889 domains. The #2 url is http://www.luckynuggetcasino.com/online-slots/ with 8,482 links from 247 domains. These numbers are more in line with what we would expect - lots of links.

But here's the amazing part: The #3 position is held by http://www.reviewslotsonline.com with only 15 links from only 8 domains (Majestic) supporting this position. Now granted we don't have access to WMT, and the numbers might be much larger there. But I've been watching this for a while and this rank has been holding, and those link numbers have not increased during that time.

Again, very impressive, both for the high rank and for the low overhead to achieve it.

Another very important point, especially if you're a Google believer. If you've been reading about authorship trust, you know that Google has been touting authorship as a way to 'confirm' your legitimacy. The claim is that people (and Google) might 'trust' your content more if attribution is present. And by placing your name & image as the author of the content within the search results, your content is supposedly more credible. With that in mind, take a close look at that #3 search result and tell me if you have more trust for that author, identified as Jess Pitt, because of this attribution - looks like a cartoon character to me.

It often seems as if there's a basic unfairness in the search that our penalty work makes very obvious. Most owners of penalized sites are victims (of seos and ignorance) and are not criminals or intentionally evil implementers of internet fraud. They lose their ranks when penalized and then spend large amounts of time and resources to recover, while these brilliant outliers run circles around them by gaming Google and either not getting penalized, or having plans to deal with those penalties when they occur. It's obviously not a model that a stable commerce site can rely on, but it does make one stop and think about it.

In closing, remember that whatever you think about the way these ranks are attained, it's not illegal, and not necessarily unethical. I always get flack for saying that last part, because most people associate gamed ranks with some kind of evil. And if the ranks are attained by putting content & links on hacked sites, then there might be some argument on the ethical front. But the gaming of Google by itself is not unethical - everyone wishes they could pull this off. The guys who succeed are doing it for the money, and will continue until Google is able to detect and enforce more robustly - these are the players that keep Google on its toes. You might even be able to argue they're doing us all a service. But if I were Google, I would see this as a huge & continuing embarrassment.

Related older post on gaming Google in the gaming industry here.

2012 SEO Disasters | Solutions

The 2012 Disasters

2012 was a truly disastrous year for sites penalized in Google. The length of time sites remained in penalties jumped from 1-6 months to a scary undetermined time frame. The majority of medium to large sites (10,000+ urls) that were harmed by Penguin are still penalized, and those that have seen their ranks return have not fully recovered. Many of these sites watched as repeated updates to both Penguin and Panda continued to tank their ranks even as efforts to correct the problems were underway. Smaller sites fared better, but only because the smaller number of links meant that their link profiles were easier to cleanse.

SEOs Are The Problem

From my vantage point, seos were always the primary cause of the penalties, and this was no different in 2012. More than 90% of the penalties we see are triggered by the "experts" and those experts have paid a price. Depending on the news source, between 60-75% of seo agencies were forced to close their doors in 2012 as clients abandoned these contractors who crashed and burned their ranks. Those that survived have had to dramatically alter their claims and strategies, especially link building services.

Outsourcing SEO : Caveat Emptor

2012 was also a disaster for most sites that relied on outsourced seo. And of the 90% mentioned above, almost all were hiring offshore services to do the bulk of the work. As a result, using cheap, offshore workers to guide the optimization of a site is now a deprecated strategy. Unfortunately the agencies and individuals that triggered the penalties are still advertising their services, and we can see that they have not really addressed the problems, only the sales messages. This is most likely because they don't fully understand what caused the problems for their clients in the first place. But also because site owners, intent on saving money, continue to look for cheap, outsourced seo, and continue to hire based on price. Clueless business owners will continue to suffer the consequences of focusing on the low cost providers - and they are abundant. A search for outsourced seo services reveals a huge number of companies and individuals making claims of seo competence that do not line up with the specific services they list.

Negative SEO

The disasters of 2012 would be incomplete without mention of negative seo, the use of strategies aimed at destroying ranks of a competitor. The door was opened to this evil by the indiscriminate enforcement actions of Google. Since no one can know who posted the unnatural links that Penguin flags, the same outsourced work that once pushed your ranks could now be used to harm your competition. Once denied as possible, the evidence is in and victims have finally been heard. The numbers of naysayers have collapsed - negative seo IS possible.

Harsher Enforcement Triggers More Significant Google Penalties

One of the most value pieces of information that I am privy to comes in the responses to reconsideration requests. Google will sometimes (when you've filed many recons and can show progress with each) send you some examples of your unnatural links. This is where we can see the changes occurring in the way Google perceives these problem links. For example, we assumed that links from certain kinds of very widespread listings were probably being discounted. We were surprised to learn that links in directories or on reciprocal links pages, if on valuable anchors, are considered unnatural. Many of the directories charged listing fees which makes the links considered paid, so that one is completely understandable, but the harmful reciprocal link examples were a stunner - because at one time Google encouraged reciprocal links. Imagine, if you took that suggestion in 2001, worked it, and did nothing else, your site could be penalized in Google right now. These recent penalties are the harshest ever, but by observing the changes in enforcement, we have important clues as to how Google now views links.

Solution: Centrally Manage Your SEO Strategy

The starting point for managing the risk associated with search is to recognize and accept the fact that SEOs are at the root of the problem. Examine the way your enterprise views optimization. If your business is search dependent, optimization is EVERYTHING, so handing over the responsibility for ranking a site to someone offshore is probably the riskiest thing you can do. The decision makers need to bring accountability for optimization to rest WITHIN the organization. The smart way to exploit cheap labor is not to hand them the keys and walk away, but to limit the work executed by that labor to specific, measurable tasks that originate from a central seo authority within the enterprise. This will increase costs & workload, and may require the hiring of a high level expert you can trust to oversee and be held accountable for the work. That will definitely require more resources, but this change in approach will also decrease risk, which has become one of the new mandates for any work done on a website.

Solution: More Transparency From Google

2012 saw a significant increase in messaging from Google, via Webmaster Tools. For the past 2 years, those messages have included warnings of doorway detection and unnatural links, in addition to technical warnings of server issues. But the most valuable messages are now sent via email from WMT, something you won't even see unless you connect an email address to your WMT account and request email notification. These emails often carry significant details specific to your case. We discussed above how these messages contribute to our understanding of what are now the new standards for a search compliant environment. We applaud Google for any new effort toward transparency, but feel there is huge need for much more transparency - for all manual actions, and especially for long penalized sites.

Solution: The New Google Link Disavow Tool

The disavow tool is an intended solution, potentially critical. Although Google claims the tool is to address bad seo, I see it as also an attempt by Google to address & downplay the outcry caused by the proliferation of negative seo as a consequence of Penguin. We don't believe it's fully implemented as yet - still waiting for evidence of efficacy.

But there's a catch. Nowhere on the disavow tool is there any messaging about a requirement to first attempt to remove links as suggested by Cutts in the video (url below). But information from responses to recon requests confirms that disavows will not be honored until you make an effort to remove the links first. The money paragraph:

"Once you have updated your site, reply to this email noting the specific changes you made. Only after there has been a significant decrease in unnatural linking will we consider reviewing your reconsideration request again. If there are links to your site that cannot be removed, you can use the disavow links tool. Please note that simply disavowing links will not be enough to make a reconsideration request successful; we will also need to see good-faith efforts to get inorganic links removed from the web wherever possible. For more information on the disavow links tool, see this blog post:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disavow-links.html."

Conclusion

2012 was a dreadful year to suffer a Google penalty, because those penalties are now harsher, and as a result more enduring and difficult to unwind. But very important markers have been laid out by Google, signaling that new rules are now in play, not all of which are known. This makes the risk of inadvertently crossing one of those invisible red lines significantly greater. Robust, technical search knowledge has always been an advantage, but now, even more than ever, competing in the search requires risk management as a first step. Internal accountability is key. Can you say for certain who is the one person within your organization responsible for the search performance of your enterprise? If you're managing the risk properly, you can answer this question.

Google May Be Quietly Acknowledging Negative SEO

In the past month, we've been filing 2-6 reconsideration requests per day, so we've seen a very large number of responses to those requests. And since Penguin we've noticed a significant change in Google's messaging concerning unnatural links, which I've mentioned in previous posts. The strongly accusatory message is now a much more gentle suggestion that you may have screwed up.

But I've lately noticed something that I believe is even more significant. Previously, when you received the unnatural links warning, you were pretty much guaranteed to receive a penalty within 3 weeks - not enough time to preemptively address the problem. So basically, everyone who received the warning eventually got penalized.

But since the warning that went out on 19-21 July 2012, a strange thing happened. Very few sites were harmed, and I believe this signals a paradigm shift within Google. Something major has changed, and I believe it is connected to a problem that Google has been in denial about in the past - negative seo.

We have always known that negative seo was possible. Penguin only made it more obvious because Google really has no clue who is actually responsible for the garbage links pointing to your sites - and triggering the penalties. Yet Google continued to claim it was not possible for 3rd parties to harm sites, even in the face of direct evidence (that we provide to them on a regular basis) that proved it was not only possible, but occurring with some regularity. Once it came under public discussion, many seos picked up that challenge and ran their own experiments.

These experiments were trying to prove that 3rd parties could indeed get sites penalized using spammy links - and in the last month many of those tests succeeded in triggering the unnatural links message. The most visible is Rand Fishkin's challenge to negative seo his site seomoz.com - he has been a mouthpiece for Google claiming it could not be done and even offering a $20,000 prize if someone could do it to his site. He got the warning earlier this month, like every other site that's under attack.

The fact that the attacks are succeeding in triggering the warning is a bad sign for Google. If they were to now penalize all these sites, they now have to know that they will be harming innocents. I believe this is why they have not acted as they have in the past.

Contrast Google's behavior with Bing. Bing has had a link disavow tool in their version of WMT for over a month. This is a tweak to Google's nose that little Bing is more functionally robust in recognizing the problem of negative seo and providing tools to address it. We have been asking for a disavow tool from Google for many years, and we're now expecting Google to deliver on this, especially since they have no options other than to harm innocent sites if they don't.

We have to balance all this against the probability that Google will act on the warnings anyway. But some sites that are under attack have several million links - so many that a granular analysis could be prohibitively expensive and still not address the problem in time.

Given all of this, the approach we're taking is to focus on the most obvious of the problems - the goal being to be able to message Google that unnatural links are coming down but to limit the financial burden in a way that will be seen as reasonable and warranted. We're doing this by concentrating on the most egregious links - site-wides, links from penalized sites, malware distributors, obvious spam, etc.

Even though most sites have so far not been harmed after the last warning it's really not responsible to advise clients to ignore those warnings, but there is a significant consequence that is going to follow any release of a disavow tool in WMT. Like many site owners have already done, just imagine spending thousands of dollars discovering and removing links only to find that it was all unnecessary.

Google, everyone still wants and needs the ability to disavow the links pointing to our sites so we can't be harmed by negative seo. It's the right thing to do. Bing already did it and it's way past time for you to follow suit.

Unnatural Links Warning

In the past several days, Google sent out a huge number of messages from Webmaster Tools. Many site owners received 3 or 4 messages within a few days. If you very recently (19 July 2012 or later) received a warning of unnatural links from Google it was very likely starts with one of these sentences:

"We've detected that some of the links pointing to your site are using techniques outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines."

"We've detected that some of the pages on your site are using techniques outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines."

These warnings are very, very similar to previous ones sent out in advance of penalizing your site, or to explain why you've been penalized. These have always been scary messages to receive.

And you're probably trying to parse that message against this one from Matt Cutts, which is trying so hard to play down the seriousness of it.

https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202/posts/gik49G9c5LU

In my view, the message can easily be interpreted as a fishing trip to see if they can trick you into removing some links, and it will probably work. Cutts' post explaining it seems so innocent and lighthearted, given the background that surrounds it. He's saying that this time it's different, doesn't mean you're about to lose your ranks. He starts by trying to downplay the message - even says, "don't panic."

But put this in the perspective of what's really going on and it will appear much less innocent. Very simply, and because of factors outside of Google's control, they are much less certain about what you are actually doing. Negative seo has cast a huge shadow over the certainty of responsibility regarding links pointed at your site. This is reflected in the language of the warning, which is much less accusatory than previous warnings.

"We don't want to put any trust in links that are artificial or unnatural. We recommend removing any unnatural links to your site. However, we do realize that some links are outside of your control. As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole."

The History Of Warnings

Couple of things to point out here. First is the history behind this message. Previously, this message sometimes appeared in WMT almost exactly 21 days prior to very granular rank suppression. Sometimes it appeared after rank loss. So in the past, this message was always connected directly to an enforcement action. So why is it different this time, exactly?

Then there's this: "If you are able to remove any of the links, please submit a reconsideration request, including the actions that you took." If you remember the penalty types, you'll know that only manual actions require a reconsideration request. Automated suppression does not. So Google is messaging us with the threat of a manual action on our sites if we don't remove some of the links deemed unnatural by them.

I read this new message as a weird kind of threat: 'we see that you're very likely using unnatural links, even if they are outside of your control, and if you can remove them we won't harm you. But if you do remove them, be sure to treat this as a penalty and file for reconsideration.'

Seems like Google's messaging is tangled up in contradictions arising from their real agenda conflicting with their desire to do the right thing. But if you received this warning, you may have to provide a sacrificial offering to satisfy the beast. Most people will read it that way which is why this fishing expedition will probably succeed.

Conclusion: If you received the warning, unless you are under negative seo attack, sacrifice some links.

PS:

One interesting observation is that of the sites that have contacted us with this message, all have large numbers of links coming from individual domains. Most of those are site-wide. We're focusing take downs on these, especially if the anchors are high value targets. Too early to know whether this is enough. In some cases, where automation was used to build the links, it probably won't be.

LSF Interactive & Netmark Demonstrate Google Penalty Incompetence

Because we oversee and task seo agencies on behalf of our clients, we often find ourselves in the role of 'client.' This gives us insight into the murky world of the retail seo sales efforts, where outrageous claims of expertise often fall flat when agencies are required to actually perform in the client's interest.

LSF Interactive and Netmark are 2 firms where we have witnessed incredible incompetence. The strategies sent to the client in both of these cases revealed plans that actually create greater risk, and in one case that strategy triggered further suppression. While we insist on stopping all link building until the penalty is resolved, LSFinteractive and Netmark both believe that pointing more links is a penalty solution. Netmark had a plan to throw 9,000 links at the site in one month, and actually started that campaign, collapsing the ranks further.

Lack of knowledge & experience leads to mistakes that harm businesses. The longer your ranks are gone, the scarier the world becomes, and every business owner, large and small knows that time is not your friend when your sales engine is broken. Enough time without sales results in first layoffs, then infrastructure triage, then shutdowns, business over. Time matters critically when you've lost your ranks.

How Long To Unwind A Google Penalty?

Those who follow our advice know to never point links home, mostly for performance reasons, but also because that strategy can save your enterprise. We've seen several instances where because the links were pointed to landing pages, and the fact that Penguin is automated, that merely changing the filenames instantly discarded all links, reviving the site in a matter of days. We have many instances where more severe penalties were lifted within 2-3 weeks, and we have a couple of Penguin unwinds that are beginning to unwind around the 30 day mark. But this is what Christopher Johnson of LSF Interactive emailed me when I requested a status report, "Anything less than a 90 day timeframe to see anything from a site penalized is unrealistic, although we have seen results within 60 days."

Perhaps this 90 day attitude is why, after over 2 weeks, they were still not able to report any progress, or even any work. Chris kept repeating to me that the site had been maliciously hacked and that prevented LSRinteractive.com from doing anything. But if you are this technically challenged, you should not be messing with Google penalties, because your ignorance just keeps the client penalized longer. When I insisted that LSF complete the link vet in a week, I was told that it was impossible - on that call were LSF employees Chris Johnson, Fumi Matsubara, Dan Summers, & Jenna Allison. As I pushed them to expedite, I kept hearing that the penalty work that I needed them to perform was beyond the scope of the contract. It became clear that they viewed this project as just another seo job, not an urgent penalty unwind.

What Should Have Happened

At that point, we fired LSF and my teams took over. We removed the hack on the first day of engagement, and repaired the server environment by the third day. It did not require specialized skill sets, just basic knowledge of directory structure, what to look for, and communication with the host. Within 4 days, we had the links completely vetted and the list of problem links in the hands of our take down team.

But for me, the real issue with lsf interactive is the sheer misrepresentation involved in the sales effort. I am now a partner in the firm that hired LSF, so I have access to all the correspondence prior to their engagement. My partners had made a very specific request: help with a Google penalty. For six weeks prior to their engagement that was what the conversation was about - the penalty and the urgency of addressing it. Penalty help was what LSFinteractive.com promised. But while they talked about link removal, LSF Interactive did absolutely nothing toward penalty remediation. Instead, they then offered a link building proposal, and then a proposal to optimize a completely different and irrelevant site. Their agenda was more sales.

Locking You In - Ripping You Off

To top it off, once fired for incompetence, LSFinteractive began using a legal argument which reveals another obnoxious fact about this agency. Their contract permits cancellation with 30 days notice, but only after 60 days - so you're locked in for 3 months. In this case that meant that the wasted $7,000 would become a wasted $21,000. We want them to attempt to defend that in court.

The New, Instant Penalty Experts, Looking For Work

One of the sad consequences of Google's recent enforcement actions is the mad scramble of retail seo agencies to attempt to exploit the opportunity created by large numbers of penalized sites. Unknowing businesses who've been penalized are vulnerable to the exaggerated claims of penalty expertise, and have no way of knowing if those claims are mostly hype.

Penguin provides a great opportunity for low level seos because in many cases the problem is just bad links. A couple of successful penalty fixes involving nothing more complex that take down notices sent to the webmasters where the links exist, leads these seos to feel empowered - and ego does the rest, creating penalty experts instantly. And more black marks for seo.

Caveat emptor.

Penguin Inadvertently Makes Paid Links More Valuable

We're seeing a train wreck here, especially with respect to Google's intention and the actual outcome. Real risk in the search for all online businesses just ramped up, while paid links just became much more valuable.

Everyone can agree with the intention behind Penguin - preventing spam from positively influencing ranks. But there are some not so good, unintended consequences stemming from this enforcement action.

From the number of requests we get for penalty help, we can usually tell when Google initiates a new enforcement action, and last week we saw record numbers of requests. As usual, inappropriate SEO techniques played a big role in why these sites were harmed.

But new to the mix were some sites who really were innocents (ie. not intentionally using off-guideline techniques) caught up in the dragnet. These innocents were in 2 groups, those that were simply clueless about appropriate SEO (biggest group by far), and those that were the victims of the actions of third parties. Remember this the next time you read that negative SEO is impossible.

Google knows innocents are being harmed. Otherwise, why the form below to inform them Penguin may have mistakenly targeted a site? We see a lot of messages from Google that appear in clients' WMT. They have been changing, and the warning is now one that is tentative - as if they suspect they may be wrong, "We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines." (emphasis mine)

Right now, for good reason, there's much discussion about rank loss and negative seo, and the retail SEOs are milking this for visibility because everyone's curious. Google and its SEO mouthpieces are downplaying the existence of negative SEO. But let's be very clear about this, the money already knows - negative SEO is real, and recognition of this fact is already changing the face of risk assessment for internet businesses. The notion of risk from negative SEO has always been around as an urban legend, but now it's on the radar as a reality. And smart businesses need to start monitoring their link profiles on a regular basis to mitigate the new risk.

So How Does All This Increase The Value Of Paid Links?

The reasons are so simple:

-1- They work.
-2- They are undetectable.
-3- All other doors are closing.

This all comes down to the fact that links are valuable for ranks, and while Google wants to enforce a no-paid links policy, it can't. Also, the streetwise players already know how wide-spread paid links are AT THE TOP OF THE SEARCH. We're talking about the big boys here, and this means that the acceptance of paid links is mainstream and pervasive.

It's becoming an unspoken fact that productive link building within the guidelines is impossible for most businesses, especially if they need to improve performance quickly. We all know what the white hat link build team does - sending out and following up on thousands of emails contacting other sites, begging for links. But can anyone claim that the links you receive as a result of this insane work are really natural? I doubt that they pass the smell test for certified organic.

Google says build great content so others will link to you naturally, and we certainly should be doing this. But just how quickly do you think that's going to attract any links of substance? So instead we have the quiet acceptance of paid links - an overt black hat strategy - successful because of the proven inability to enforce against it.

Paid Links: The Last Man Standing

But garbage links are easy to detect so they are taking the hit, and it's probably a good thing to take spam links off the table. The problems all derive from the way this was handled, and not just in the last week.

For many years up until last week, large numbers of crappy links could actually work for you, and as that became obvious, the garbage links industry took off, with buy-in from many professional SEOs. But Penguin is shutting that down. And now that the low hanging fruit is toxic, the important question is, "Where do you go for links?"

It's going to be pretty obvious to everyone that the only effective, accessible, and scalable rank push left standing is paid links.

This outcome is ironic. One of Google's biggest nemesis', and something they've been unsuccessfully attempting to shut down for years - paid links - just got a tremendous, inadvertent thumbs up from Penguin. And in spite of Google's lofty democratic principles, where rank can't be influenced by money, this puts rank squarely into the hands of those who can most afford to pay for it.

Dealing With Rank Loss From Penguin

According to Google, the 24 April 2012 enforcement update now has an official name - Penguin. And it follows right on the heals of another Panda update, released on 19 April 2012, more of a content filter.

So if you saw your ranks tumble this month, and it's important to know which update did the damage, you might be able to find out if you observe the point at which your ranks tanked and reference the above dates.

Google Penguin Response Form

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEVxdmdRWFJRTjRoLWZVTHZkaTBQbkE6MQ

I think it's very interesting that the very first part of the form is a link to a Google resource set up to receive reports of spam, basically recruiting us to contribute to their enforcement reach.

If you need to use the form, please also add a request that Google provide a way to disavow bad links from Webmaster Tools. This would permit continued enforcement, but allow businesses to escape harm caused by the actions of third parties, or for past mistakes. Forgiveness needs to be part of the enforcement action, or else the harm done to innocents cannot be undone. And forcing us to wait for the update that fixes this is not appropriate.

Occupy Google

I noticed a few days ago that "site:domain.com" searches no longer go any deeper than 1,000 urls - many sites show significantly less, even when the number of indexed urls is high. Not yet seeing any push back from the seo community, but this is really huge for those of us responsible for the ranks of our clients. If your site has a large number of urls, this change means that you no longer can view what Google has cached beyond a limited set that is no greater than 1,000 results. This is not a good thing.

Over time, Google has become less and less transparent regarding the data that it chooses to make available to us. The recent uproar over Google's announcement to prevent access to referral data from logged-in searches has appropriately angered the seo community and is only the latest in a string of harmful pullbacks.

"Last week, the search giant said that it would begin encrypting logged-in searches that users do by default, when they are logged into Google.com. This further integration of a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) will prevent search marketers from receiving referral data from the websites consumers click on from Google search results." seos were not buying google's privacy motive for encrypting search 2011-10

So Google's walling off and withholding the data on the search behavior of its user base, and claiming they're doing it for security/privacy reasons. They're downplaying the small numbers this involves, but at the same time, they're making it easier, and encouraging users to remain logged in - you can choose to do this from every Google property (eg. Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Google News, Google Video, etc.). So these numbers are not going to stay small, and the more it grows the more valuable the data you're not getting. Apparently, you can get access to the https data by advertising. How can you buy the privacy excuse when the changes do not impact advertisers? I see this as a way for Google to compete with Facebook - isolating the community into a vertical, then monetizing the data. It's their right, but it's bad for us.

In July 2010, Google removed our ability to see all inbound links they had discovered. Webmaster Tools now shows us only a 'sample' of the total they store. I have 2 posts on this: Caffeine May Have A Hidden Cost & Coping With The Loss Of Link Metrics. So Google penalizes sites for certain kinds of links, yet we may not be able to discover those issues when our ranks are harmed.

The withholding of data has become a pattern over the recent past. Here's a summary of the important ones I'm aware of:

- Index searches now incomplete - limited to 1,000
- Logged-in search metrics no longer available
- Link data from Webmaster Tools incomplete
- Supplemental results still exist but are no longer labeled as such

And while we're on the subject of harmful decisions, a client had an experience with Google that is the epitome of unethical and unjust behavior from the enterprise that claims to do no evil. His site was penalized and in order to keep his business functioning had to turn to Adwords (Google undoubtedly gains advertisers by penalizing sites). After a short time, the Adwords account was suspended, with no explanation. It turns out that a competitor had complained falsely that my client was selling counterfeit merchandise. Google would not reveal who the complainant was, and the only way to recover the account was to have the manufacturers confirm that my client was indeed a legitimate distributor of their goods. In Google's eyes, my client was guilty based on the claims of unnamed accusers, and the burden was on him to prove his innocence.

I'm aware that Google has the right to do all the things being discussed here, and in spite of its pr machine touting how people friendly the place is, it is a corporation that has morphed into a huge monopoly with agendas that reveal them to be more of an adversary than ever before. And lets not forget that every major industry, oil, telephone, railroads, steel, etc. all evolved via a free market to the point that one giant monopolized the market, and regulation was required to force ethical behavior upon them. Google is that monopoly right now, without the regulation.

Occupy Wall Street is the result of people finally saying, "Enough!" to the bad behavior. Wondering when that threshold will be reached with Google's continuing slide, and will enough people be willing to camp out to motivate change. Kind of scary to think about.

Google Has Lost The War Against Paid Links

This post is a follow on to Enterprise Search Manipulation, which discusses problems Google has with enforcement actions against major players like JCPenney.

Like the JCP fiasco, once again Google proves that it is incompetent with regard to enforcing its own guidelines with respect to the buying of links to push rank.

For the second time this year, the NY Times calls Google out for being unable to detect black hat techniques associated with the purchasing of PR. This time, it's not just one company, but the top 4 businesses (measured by their search results) showing up for searches for "Mother's Day Flowers" - search for "Trying to Game Google on 'Mother's Day Flowers'" to read the article without triggering the paywall/registration. The article is here. Relevant excerpts:

Internet marketing experts say Teleflora, FTD, 1800Flowers.com and ProFlowers are trying to elevate their Web sites in search results with a strategy that violates Google's guidelines.

The flower companies deny it. But all four have links on Web sites that are riddled with paid links, many of which include phrases like "mothers day flowers," "mothers day arrangements" and "cheap mothers day flowers." Anyone who clicks on those backlinks, as they are known, gets sent to the floral retailer who paid for them.

The links have now been evaluated by several independent experts (including us) and the article sites several examples that demonstrate the links were paid for.

Google denies that these websites were advantaged by their link buys, and further claims their automation is robust enough to detect and discount paid links - something we know to be false.

On Wednesday, The New York Times sent Google representatives a list of roughly 6,000 links to the flower companies that were built in the last month. After Google's spam team studied the list, a company spokesman, Jake Hubert, sent this statement:

"None of the links shared by The New York Times had a significant impact on our rankings, due to automated systems we have in place to assess the relevance of links. As always, we investigate spam reports and take corrective action where appropriate."

In essence, Google said that these companies tried to game its algorithm, but for the most part, their efforts failed.

We doubt the claim that the links were fully discounted, but because of the nontransparent nature of Google's algorithm, no independent entity can confirm these claims. And although we can confirm the paid links exist in each case, there is so far no consequence for the clearly black hat strategy employed by these players:

Google is not saying whether it plans to demote any of the companies, but as of late Friday, it had not. A search of "mothers day flowers" had Proflowers at No. 1, 1800Flowers at No. 2, Teleflora at No. 3 and FTD at No. 4.

Once again, important questions are raised concerning not only Google's ability to enforce their own guidelines, but also the fairness of the existing search results. We know for a fact that the top of the most competitive search results is very often populated by sites using black hat techniques, especially the use of paid links. Knowing this, it becomes impossible to advise clients to always stay within Google's guidelines - because those that do will be disadvantaged by those who don't.

And while we know that Google can impose harsh consequences for those who step outside their guidelines, we also know that these consequences are not dealt out consistently. In both this and the previous article on JCP, the Times leads readers to believe that JCP suffered a penalty as a result of their link buys. This is untrue. Google only removed their ill gotten gains - and did not impose the kind of penalty we see when smaller businesses get caught doing the same thing. A real penalty would have made JCP unfindable even for their trademark.

And there's clearly a quality of too big to fail present here. Google's own reputation would probably suffer if they had to penalize the 4 top players in any business, since searches that did not include them would appear to be much less relevant, and their absence would be very noticeable even to the novice searcher.

Now that violators have so much to gain and so little to lose, gaming Google has become a mainstream activity not just for the large players. It's an astounding failure on Google's part to have put us in this position where their rules are not able to be consistently enforced, because the consequence is that bad behavior is being encouraged. The model has shifted in a perverse way to actually favor black hat strategies.

The fact that the discovery of questionable ranking strategies have to be revealed by a newspaper, rather than by Google's automation only compounds the failure. And the unconfirmable denials of Google's enforcement team that these obvious paid links have no bearing on ranks is truly laughable. Does anyone still believe they would all be doing this if it didn't work? The top 4 national flower websites are laughing all the way to the bank.

The real story here is the fact that the big boys are all flaunting Google's guidelines with impunity, and that tells us that Google has lost the war on paid links.

Google Penalties Now Called Manual Actions

Are we starting to see some transparency from Google in their responses to reconsideration requests? So far, we've only seen 5 examples of this version of a new response, which denies "manual actions" (read 'manual Google penalties'), suggesting that fixing the issue will auto-correct the ranking losses. We welcome this change because it includes some real information regarding the rank loss, even though we can't tell whether they're acknowledging a penalty with it. This suggests that there is at least one other response that acknowledges 'manual actions' or denies automated actions. Note how the word 'penalty' is not present.

If you've seen a different response, please send it to us in a comment.

*********************

Reconsideration request for http://www.xxxxxxx.xxx/: No manual spam actions found

April 22, 2011

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.xxxxxxx.xxx/,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.xxxxxxx.xxx/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.

Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users.

If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.

If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

*********************

This response suggests that this specific rank loss is the result of an algorithmic action, or automated Google penalty, that can be unwound by simply fixing the issue.

We know from previous posts by Matt Cutts & this video that manual penalties come with a clock - a time frame that determines the length of time you'll be punished. From the penalties experienced by our clients, we suspect those time frames somehow line up with the perceived severity of your non-compliance. We've seen the time frame on newly compliant sites range from 90 days to over 6 months.

This is controversial by itself - so you get put in jail for some period of time, even if your rank loss was triggered by an inadvertent error and you've corrected it. We'll be looking at this much more closely now to determine whether that time frame is started from the fix, or from the start of the penalty, and exactly what the time frames may be. We strongly suspect they start once the site is compliant, and a reconsideration request is filed. We doubt a manual action is going to self correct once the site is compliant.

For automated penalties, we suspect you're not getting out until you're compliant, and then have to wait out some additional period before release as the bots update the index.

Google Bomb Today

Looks like Google issued their biggest update yet today. It affected us, and a lot of people we know, what are you seeing? I came up with my own list, but #1 on the list is very specific to today's update. Some of the others are well known, some of them need to be explained and are not well known.

Things I am seeing with the Google updates:

1) They cranked up the dial big time for % of exact match anchors to the target page (very bad for us) all the old blog links we bought were 100% exact match anchors, 3 per article. None of the ones we bought in the last year were like that, and often times had no/random anchors. XXXXXXXX alert got pinged for it in the last Google update, they turned up the dial which means bad news for our top interior landing pages. Overall domain authority was a negative benefactor, so even pages without any links were dropped a few spots as well.

2) Social shares is a much bigger factor (good for us)

3) Brand signals is a much bigger factor (ok for us, not good) That pushes Amazon up and other huge sites

4) Number and % of no followed links to the target page plays a very big role

5) They could stopped rankings from passing of paid blog networks

6) Number of ad units on the page plays a big negative role. (good and bad) We don't have ads/affiliate offers but a lot of our old blog links had tons of low quality ads

7) Scraper sites and low quality directories were zapped (good for us)

8) Local sites are showing in the organic results for certain queries (bad for us). I think Google will unwind this do to low quality

9) Exact match domains and long domains were devalued (good for us) bad for our affiliates and some competitors.

10) Click-through rate of organic is a big factor now (Great for us)

11) Site Speed is a bigger factor (I just popped an email to Strangeloop and EC to get Google to see our enhanced version of our site this week)

Update: 12 April 2011

The update hit mid-day yesterday, I expect most people don't know what happened yet. Anyone who had pages that were too heavy on exact match anchor text got pinged bad. Anyone with a low percentage of no-follow links got pinged. Since so many links were just devalued completely, domain authority on many sites really got hurt.

This was definitely an algo update. Keep me updated on what you see and hear in the next week.

Penalized Site Seeks Help: papofurado.com

My site www.papofurado.com was created in 2008 august, e disappeared disappeared results of Google searches on 18/01/2011, my difficulty in finding the cause is through intentionally did not do anything that might have caused this penalty. Not working with purchases or sales links, I have no links to partners, not applied any black hat technique and did not change on the site today.

The only question I could think as a possible reason would be a considerable increase of about 70% on visits in 2011 caused by visitors coming in the original articles and no attempts at manipulation, but that generated a spike in the graph analysis(which put the attachment to view) at this time the site fell dramatically around 90%.

I therefore ask for help diagnose possible reasons for this penalty from
Google!

I am available for Further Information!

Did The Hammer Come Down On Content Aggregators

You might have heard that the hammer was about to come down on a part of the web universe occupied by white hat link builders. Lot's of screaming was taking place surrounding the pending Panda or Farmer update to Google's algo. Some hints from within Google lead to rumors about the target being sites with poor content, with finger pointing in anticipation of losses for Demand Media, eHow, EzineArticles, and other 'content farms.'

And then it just happened. Sometime around the end of February 2011, the switch was thrown, and comments from Matt Cutts suggested that the change would impact about 11.8% of the search. That's actually a pretty gigantic impact. When Google makes a change of this magnitude, the search world kind of shakes a little.

The measurable hit to these "content farms" in the first few days had some suggesting that this change would be a fatal blow to the link strategies involving them. SISTRIX showed some metrics that WebProNews picked up on along with searchenginewatch and others showing massive traffic drops for some selected sites. Very scary stuff for anyone with resources in this game.

The media is playing the algo change up as a massive overhaul that is wreaking devastation and upheaval, and some of that is unavoidably being carried into the seo community as if it were true.

This doomsday frenzy is currently being followed up with individual horror stories. Some include sites with proven records of quality content - sites that are so good that their content is always copied verbatim. One of note is fonerbooks.com - having seen the heavy hand of Google before, this is completely expected. We hope some adjustments will be forthcoming in the immediate future to roll back some of the harsh treatment improperly imposed on some good sites. Algo changes always leave victims in their wake.

We, like many other professional optimizers, build content on aggregator sites for the links, so we have an important stake in how this shakes out. In principle, we believe Google has to set standards that are high enough so that the garbage doesn't rank, no matter where it's posted. We know that's not happening - garbage is everywhere and ranking. But does it make sense to drop the ranks of genuinely useful content from certain sites, just because of where it's posted?

One of the sites taking the biggest hit according to SISTRIX was suite101.com. This is a site that has a uniqueness requirement on content posted there. In other words, if you post the same content elsewhere, suite101.com takes your content down. Yet they took one of the biggest hits. How can this be? When they look carefully at exactly what happened there, I suspect they'll discover that uniqueness is not enough to determine quality. Garbage can be easily be made unique.

A check on some of the aggregator content we recently posted for clients does not reveal any significant losses. Like any content on any site, these articles are subject to some of the same mercurial forces - meaning that even before the algo change, our forensics would reveal much of this content not indexed, or indexed in the supplemental results. Over time, well written, useful articles from some of the aggregators gradually make it into the index,and actually hold rank. So far this is not changing. One of the critical pieces of this strategy is to spread your content across many platforms. Because not all aggregators are the same, and finding the ones that have their act together is something that requires constant vigilance.

And my guess is that the value of the content aggregator link building strategy is not going to go away any time soon - and it's not going to change very much for those creating high quality work. Because if Google were to begin to use a standard other than quality, no matter where the content resided, it would lead to the collapse of relevance within their search results. I also noticed that content copied from our sites are still holding ranks for the copiers, something I was hoping to see change. But this still makes sense - the fact that people copy and reuse quality content only proves its stature, and that stature very likely will continue to be rewarded if the evaluation is really based on perceived value.

Our recommendation is to continue to put resources into content aggregator programs used for relevant link building, provided the content created meets a quality standard that is rigorous. The key is and always was quality. Content is still king.

Update:
We are finding other sites that support similar views, like nichebot and potpiegirl