If you’re going to openly sell crap links on the footer of your site to Mesothelioma Lawyers, Ticket Scalpers, Personal Injury Law Firms and other blatant spam related and irrelevant sites (sites which are not relevant to your own), Google is going to find you out and probably penalize you.
Such is the case of NewsDay.com, which was slapped with a Google Penalty for openly selling spam links throughout their high profile site.
Barry Schwartz points to a Google Groups thread where a Googler responds to the NewsDay.com PageRank issue :
Thanks for your post. I’m glad you’re posting here in the Webmaster Help Group, because the discussions here help educate webmasters around the globe. I just checked over newsday.com and compared it to the most recent version of newsday.com that was indexed by Archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20070829225145/http://www.newsday.com/
Scrolling near the bottom of what your site used to look like, I see the following “Featured Links”: Mesothelioma Lawyer Lung Cancer Personal Injury Law Firm Buy Mets Tickets Buy Yankees Tickets Wicked Tickets Hamptons Travel
Please remember that participating in link schemes intended to manipulate search engine rankings, including buying or selling links that pass PageRank, is a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, and may impact your site’s standing in Google: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356
If you believe your site was at one point in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines, and you have since made changes to your site so that it fits within the guidelines, you can request reconsideration of your site by following the steps here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843
Don’t play with fire, or you’ll get burnt. Thus is what happened to NewsDay.com, which was knocked from a PageRank 8 to a PageRank 5 (and seems to be back up to an 8 now). If you are going to sell links, or buy links, or do whatever with links, make sure that the links are contextually relevant and not obvious ad buys.
And if you own a legit website and get an email from someone asking to link to their personal injury sites and casino sites for $500 a month, tell them no (unless your site is about gambling or personal injury lawyers, then perhaps something can be worked out).
Vote for this post : 3
or Buzz it at Yahoo :
Comments
19 responses so far ↓
andrew on Jul 11, 2008 at 9:16 am
You just gave me great ammunition to kill a discussion with a spammer who’s been soliciting me for this kind of thing for weeks. Thank you!
WebSite Design Orange County on Jul 11, 2008 at 10:16 am
It’s nice to see this, but I wish Google was more vigilant about penalizing this type of linking. They seem to be somewhat arbitrary about who they go after and when they go after them.
kaushik on Jul 11, 2008 at 10:32 am
What if somebody sell links but appropriately label them as “sponsored” or “advertisement”? Will they be penalized too?
“It’s nice to see this, but I wish Google was more vigilant about penalizing this type of linking. They seem to be somewhat arbitrary about who they go after and when they go after them.”
Agreed. I don’t like Google’s partiality. I have seen plenty of sites selling text links openly and yet they have very high PR.
Eric Itzkowitz on Jul 11, 2008 at 12:16 pm
@ Kaushik
You can sell links! Just be sure to add the nofollow attribute to the link(s). This tells Google your intention is purely commercial, not to artificially influence rank. Doing this, however, may not yield such advertising opportunities, as most want the benefit of the PR you would normally pass by not using nofollow.
As Loren eludes to, there are other creative advertising opportunities, buy you must first carefully weigh your risk/reward ratio before implementing anything.
Brent D. Payne on Jul 11, 2008 at 12:37 pm
I just wish it wouldn’t have taken so long to get this resolved with Google. I have been working on this for months now and did a reinclusion request months ago as well. Furthermore, it didn’t show up in Google Webmaster Tools as a warning or any type of alert.
P.S. I started here in February of 2008.
Brent D. Payne
SEO Manager
Tribune Interactive
Jaan Kanellis on Jul 11, 2008 at 2:26 pm
So what actually happened to them? Who cares if they lost some TBPR? Did they lose traffic, lose rank? I still see shit links at the bottom of their pages.
On another note why in the world would they nofollow to their own internal pages under Site Index??
Brent D. Payne on Jul 11, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Jaan,
Proprietary info on the numbers. But it’s one of the first things I looked at when I got here and it was a continued concern. Not saying any more than that.
As for the nofollows . . . you’ll notice most of those links are already on the page or their parent link is on the page. Can speak much more about it.
Sorry,
Brent
Jaan Kanellis on Jul 11, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Sure Brent, if the links are on the page already do you think nofollowing them has some sort of effect on the engines? you think that they would frown on page linking out the same link twice?
Nofollowing internal links is just crazy to me.
Brent D. Payne on Jul 11, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Jaan,
There are two schools of thought. I am of the school of thought that PageRank sculpting or siloing when you have hundreds of links, on a page on a high PR site, with hudreds of thousands of pages… is the proper thing to do.
But SEO is an art not a science so I respect your opinion on the matter.
Brent D. Payne
SEO Manager
Tribune Interactive
Jaan Kanellis on Jul 11, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Brent I am not saying what your doing is wrong, rather questioning the way. Asking for further explanation as to how this can help anyone else out there that is interested. Is it worth the time to worry about?
Brent D. Payne on Jul 11, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I think we are off topic at this point . . . but feel free to email me via my contact information located at http://www.brentdavidpayne.com and I’ll provide a more detailed explanation.
Brent
David Bender on Jul 11, 2008 at 4:21 pm
News Day should be slapped, that was under handed and its dirty pool, it hurts the real site owners out there trying hard to establish themselves.
They should be upfront and professional about their links and how it will effect the owner linking to them.
But with a page rank of 8 its not really a big blow to be knocked down to pr 5 and get the rank right back as quickly as they did.
Obviously the big G didn’t care that much, it
was more of a slap of the wrist like a child
gets a polite slap on the wrist for trying to
take the candy from the shelve more than
once then they get it..
David
http://runyourcaronwaterguide.wordpress.com/
Brent D. Payne on Jul 11, 2008 at 4:43 pm
David Bender,
The penalty was put in place in 2007 the offending code was removed in 2007 also. I started in February 2008 and immediately filed a reinclusion request, called Google to explain the situation, but it still took until now to get the penalty removed . . . I think that is more than a slap on the wrist.
The people that are responsible for the offending code are no longer with Tribune and I have made it very clear that this can not and will not happen again.
Brent
Richard Hearne on Jul 11, 2008 at 10:30 pm
I’ve seen similar, and my experience is that the TBPR penalty is purely optical. Traffic very often is not affected.
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=www.newsday.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
I imagine newsday also only received an optical penalty.
@Brent - while stats are proprietary, any reason why you cant say if you feel the penalty affected your traffic? You can safely say if it did without giving competitors any info on your site’s traffic.
Rgds
Richard
Brent D. Payne on Jul 11, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Richard,
Mostly political but watch Trends and everyone will know the outcome of this. It’s a good test.
I’m just happy that everyone in NY is happy. ;-)
Brent
PR NY on Jul 12, 2008 at 6:58 am
Google’s policy of penalizing top sites that sell links by dropping their page rank is not an intelligent approach and more of a retaliation.
If they are really bothered that a site is doing this - they could simply take the external PR juice from that site but not touch the actual PR of the site - which it has earned ( and of course send a warning to the site)
Perhaps their logic is buy decreasing the PR - buyers will be less likely to pay the high prices these PR8 links must cost.
But one has to ask - what if an Advertiser was on the front page with a link to its Website?
Isn’t that fundamentally the same thing?
Also a site like NewsDay will probably examine the links to verify that they are quality links to quality Websites - this in a sense Validates that link’s relevancy and the related Website in the same way that a Yahoo or Dmoz Editor validates their submissions.
In a real-world sense, one could argue that any company wishing to spend big bucks on a link listing in a top newspaper is more tech savvy and more ambitious about getting customers than a company that buys an obscure classified ad or small listing. This could potentially be good news to some prospects.
Finally, while there is a strong focus on Google, it must be remembered that Yahoo, MSN and Ask are also spidering those links and possibly increasing their rankings. Although they do not bring in as much traffic as Google, collectively they have good potential and should not be ignored. So even if Google penalized a site - buying links could still help on the others and could be a selling point to a site refusing to cave in to Google’s retaliatory tactics.
Richard Hearne on Jul 12, 2008 at 7:13 am
@PR NY - you’re kidding right? I’m no Google apologist, but saying that the links in question were likely verified as “quality links to quality Websites”?
I think it’s fair to say that as long as the target sites broke no laws, and their credit cards didn’t bounce their links were published.
I mean it’s not like ‘Mesothelioma Lawyer’ sticks out like a sore thumb…
Can I ask if you are related in some way to the site in question?
Looking at the current newsday.com homepage I’m actually surprised that they lifted the TBPR penalty. While all the sites you link to may be within their own corporate netwrok, I’d say some of the anchor text targeting is pushing boundaries. I’ve certainly seen similar sites get TBPR Penalties for less.
Rgds
Richard
andrew on Jul 12, 2008 at 7:41 am
If link relevancy is the question, is the answer to sell relevant links and avoid being penalized? Or would you get banned anyway?
CVOS man on Jul 13, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Very interesting case study. I posted a screenshot showing the 100 nofollowed footer links and links to local sites that still receive link credit.
Can I be a niche local partner with Newsday and get the PR8 links too?
Leave a Comment