May 15, 2013 at 3:45am ET by Matt McGee

What a week it's been where Google and SEO are concerned. The company, via Matt Cutts, has issued several warnings about things to come -- and, late Tuesday night, also revealed that it's just acted against another link network. In a pair of tweets, Cutts -- the head of Google's webspam team -- said that Google has taken action against "several thousand" link sellers that were part of a link network that bought and sold links that pass PageRank. In addition to mattcutts.com/blog/what-to-e… it's safe to assume webspam will continue to tackle link networks that violate our guidelines as we [...]

Link Seller Linking To You? Google Says You Won’t Benefit From It.

Apr 3, 2013 at 10:32am ET by Barry Schwartz

Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, posted a 90-second video on what happens if a site that is selling links also links to your site. In short, Matt Cutts explains that when sites that sell links (with Google knowing about it) link to you, Google won't pass value from that link seller website. So, if a site that sells links is linking to you, it most likely won't hurt you. Matt said that the link will not benefit you and most likely will not hurt you. Matt explained: (1) Websites that sell links will see their toolbar PageRank downgraded by 30, 40 or 50%. (2) The site wil [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Link Building: Paid Links | Top News

Google Penalized One Article On BBC’s Web Site

Mar 18, 2013 at 10:26am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google did end commenting on why the BBC received an unnatural link notification despite offering us a "no comment" on our story this past Friday. Was the BBC penalized for unnatural links? Was it possible that the world's largest news organization was not trusted by Google's algorithms? The answer is, only one article was penalized. John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland, said in a Google Help thread: Looking into the details here, what happened was that we found unnatural links to an individual article, and took a granular action based on that. This is not nega [...]

Google Sends BBC News A Manual Link Penalty Notification

Mar 15, 2013 at 12:19pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google has sent the world's largest broadcast news organization, BBC News, an unnatural link notification last Saturday. The Search Engine Roundtable reports Nick, a BBC News representative, posted in the Google Help Forums about the notification. Nick was seeking advice from Google or SEOs on how he may find those unnatural links so the BBC can remove them and submit a reconsideration request. Nick wrote: I am a representative of the BBC site and on Saturday we got a 'notice of detected unnatural links'. Given the BBC site is so huge, with so many independently run sub sections, wit [...]

Did Google Just Penalize Another Link Network? SAPE Links

Mar 7, 2013 at 9:09am ET by Barry Schwartz

Unconfirmed reports are surfacing throughout the SEO community that Google has penalized yet another link network. The rumors within the industry are that the link network targeted by Google is named SAPE links. Webmasters who have used the SAPE link network are reporting that their sites have taken hard penalties within Google, resulting in a huge downgrade in ranking. Not all webmasters agree it is the SAPE link network but feel it may be a different network all together. There are forum thread discussions at Black Hat World and Black Hat Group that have webmasters and SEOs claimin [...]

Will Google Penalize Chromebooks, Google Analytics, AdWords & Google+ For Using Advertorials?

Feb 23, 2013 at 8:18pm ET by Danny Sullivan

A day after warning publishers against advertorials, will Google's search team now have to penalize parts of its own company for running advertorials? Perhaps, and if so, it wouldn't be the first time. It's also another absurd chapter in Google's war on paid links. Google Says: Advertorials, Beware! After news came out yesterday that Google had apparently penalized Interflora for running advertorials -- and also reduced the PageRank values of many UK newspapers that carried these -- Google finally blogged a general warning against such practices. From its post: Please be wary if some [...]

Google’s Cutts On How To Locate Unnatural Links Pointing To Your Web Site

Feb 11, 2013 at 1:14pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, released a video today explaining how a webmaster can locate which links pointing to their website is "unnatural." As you know, Google has been sending unnatural link warnings to Webmasters for about a year now. Webmasters should act when they receive this email; they should remove the unnatural links. What happens if you really do not know which links pointing to your site are unnatural? Google's Matt Cutts gives you two ways to discover these links. (1) You can sort your links to your site within Webmaster Tools by most recent links. (2) [...]

Infographic: When Link Building Turns Into A Linkpocalypse

Feb 4, 2013 at 1:04pm ET by Search Engine Land Infographics

If you want to succeed with gaining search traffic through SEO, building links is one of the most important ranking factors that can help you. But go too far, and the search police might crack down on you. How do you avoid a disaster? To help, the folks at DNA created a "Link Apocalypse" infographic summarizing some recent missteps in building links and the consequences, including Google even punishing itself for buying paid links (click to enlarge it): A note about the first example. iAcquire is called a "gray-hat" firm (well, the "grey-hat" spelling is used). It [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Infographics | Link Building: Paid Links

Links From Press Releases Do Have Ranking Benefit Despite What Google Says

Jan 15, 2013 at 9:20am ET by Barry Schwartz

A few weeks ago, Google's Matt Cutts posted in the Google forums that links from within press releases do not "benefit your rankings." I covered this tidbit of news at the Search Engine Roundtable and it got a lot of feedback from the community. Today, the SEO Consult blog posted a test showing how links from within press releases can indeed have a ranking benefit in Google. This was tested, ironically, on Matt Cutts blog, where SEO Consult issued a press release on PR.com with the anchor text "sreppleasers" pointing to Matt's blog. The press release was indexed by Google and shortly lat [...]

Will 2013 Bring A Paid Link Resurgence?

Dec 11, 2012 at 12:56pm ET by Julie Joyce

With Google rolling out frequent changes, the last couple of years have been alternately amazingly fun and freakishly terrifying for anyone who builds links or has links built. It should be clear by now that your site can be harmed by poor quality links, whether you bought them or got them for free, or heck, didn't even intentionally get them. I previously stated (in several places) that I thought negative SEO was more of a scare tactic than a reality but I've since changed my mind after witnessing it firsthand a few times. As much as some people like to think that links aren't as import [...]

Link Building Scam Alert: When Links Are Held Hostage

Nov 13, 2012 at 10:30am ET by Eric Ward

On November 1st I reached the 19 year mark as a content publicist/link builder. Nineteen years. I won't bore you with how we went after links back then by rubbing two sticks together and sending up smoke signals. Smoke signal spam was not a big problem yet. I poke fun at myself but at the same time there are a few things that longevity is quite good for. First, I have seen just about every linking scheme ever created, whether by clients eager to get my opinion of them, by seeing them in a backlink analyses, or by being the recipient of a spam email trying to sell them to me. Other advant [...]

Q&A With Google’s Matt Cutts On How To Use The Link Disavow Tool

Oct 29, 2012 at 9:15am ET by Danny Sullivan

It's been almost two weeks since Google launched its link disavowal tool. Some have been busy diving in and using it, but others have had more detailed questions about it. We've got some answers, from the head of Google's web spam team, Matt Cutts. Question: How do people know what links they should remove? Answer: When we're taking targeted action on some specific links, the emails that go out now include examples of bad links. We provide example links to guide sites that want to clean up the bad links. At the same time, we don't want to help bad actors learn how to spam better, wh [...]

Google Reminds Webmasters: Selling Links Can Lead To PageRank Penalty

Aug 28, 2012 at 9:46am ET by Barry Schwartz

Matt Cutts, Google's lead of search spam, wrote a blog post named "Why did our PageRank go down?" The post is a reminder to webmasters that selling links that pass PageRank can lead to a Google penalty. Back in October 2007, Google officially came out saying selling paid links can hurt your PageRank and then shortly after, Google dished out the PageRank penalties to many web sites, including some major newspaper web sites. Since then, Google added the terms to their webmaster guidelines and has done videos on the topic. Matt shared the email he sent to the publisher about why their [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Link Building: Paid Links | Top News

Here’s A New Twist: Directories Now Charging NOT To Link

Jul 20, 2012 at 9:22am ET by Barry Schwartz

For the past year, Google has been sending out link penalty notifications for unnatural links pointing to your web site. Those notifications kicked up a notch earlier this year and since then - especially with the Penguin update, webmasters and SEOs have been obsessed with link removals. Link Removal Fees: With this, there are many out there trying to capitalize on this fear. A reader sent us an example of a directory with a special landing page specifically designed to collect money from webmasters in order to remove links from their site. The site offers you to pay them and in exchange, th [...]

Not All Bad Links Hurt You, Google Ignores Links Also

Jun 29, 2012 at 1:34pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google doesn't always penalize you for bad links, they sometimes and very often, will ignore links completely that they find to be against their guidelines. Back in 2007, Google started penalizing sites for selling paid links and over the years they have penalized many sites for buying links. Recently, Google has stepped up their notifications of unnatural link warnings and with the Penguin update many webmasters have been obsessed with cleaning up their external link profiles. Ignoring Links But you need to know, not all links that may look bad or even be really bad actually harm your si [...]

Google’s Matt Cutts On Affiliate Links: We Handle Majority Of Them

Jun 25, 2012 at 10:38am ET by Barry Schwartz

The video about is from the SMX Advanced show in 2012 where Danny Sullivan asked Google's Matt Cutts about nofollowing affiliate links. Matt responded that although they handle the majority of affiliate links automatically, if you are at all worried, you should nofollow those links to be careful. Here is what Matt said, if you can't watch the video above: We handle the vast majority of affiliate stuff correctly because if it is a large enough affiliate network we know about it and we handle it on our side. Even though we handle I believe the vast majority of affiliate links app [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Link Building: Paid Links

iAcquire: We’re Abandoning Paid Links

May 29, 2012 at 3:13pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Last week, iAcquire found itself accused of purchasing links for clients. Google seemed convinced, banning iAcquire from its index. Now, iAcquire says that it will no longer purchase links for new clients and will phase out paid links for existing customers and campaigns. "In certain cases, we have allowed finanical compensation to develop links, not as our only tool but one of them," said Joe Griffin, cofounder and partner with iAcquire, when I spoke with him earlier today. "Effectively immediately, we've removed that tool from our toolset. We've issued a company-wide memo and told everyo [...]

iAcquire Banned From Google After Link Buying Allegations

May 24, 2012 at 9:03pm ET by Barry Schwartz

The search marketing agency, iAcquire, that was allegedly responsible for buying links for clients was just banned from Google's search results. iAcquire was cited as the agency behind Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation's link buy request emails. For more on that see our story named What Can We Learn From The Latest Brand To Be Called Out For Paid Links? A site command search for [site:www.iacquire.com] returns no results. Here is a screen shot: iAcquire's robots.txt file and source code has no signs of them manually requesting to be deindexed from Google. So this seems [...]

What Can We Learn From The Latest Brand To Be Called Out For Paid Links?

May 22, 2012 at 8:18pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Move over JC Penney. Another brand is getting attention over buying links, this time Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation. Today's news is less news and more a reminder of lessons that SEO companies, clients and publishers all need to keep in mind, to avoid trouble. Josh Davis drew attention to the DBCC situation in his post today, documenting how after receiving three link requests from the same person, he finally followed up, only to be pitched on placing a link from one of his articles to the DBCC site in return for $30 per month. What's Dun & Bradstreet -- the nearly 200 [...]

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