Search Engine Land » SEO: Spamming

Two Weeks In, Google Talks Penguin Update, Ways To Recover & Negative SEO

Danny Sullivan — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:00:09 +0000

It’s been about two weeks since Google launched its Penguin Update. Google’s happy the new spam-fighting algorithm is improving things as intended. But some hurt by it are still wondering how to recover, and there remain concerns about “negative SEO” as a threat. I caught up with Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, on these and some related questions.

Penguin: “A Success”

The goal of any algorithm update is to improve search results. So how’s Penguin been for Google?

“It’s been a success from our standpoint,” Cutts said.

What About Those Weird Results?

Of course, soon after Penguin was released, people quickly started citing examples of odd results. The official Viagra site wasn’t listed, while hacked sites were. An empty web site was listed for “make money online,” and there were reports of other empty sites ranking well. Scraper sites were reported outranking the sites they scraped.

How could Penguin be a success with these types of things happening?

Cutts said that many of these issues existed before Penguin launched and were not caused by the new spam-fighting algorithm.

Indeed, the Viagra issue, which has now been fixed, was a problem before Penguin hit. Penguin didn’t cause it.

False Positives? A Few Cases

How about false positives, people who feel they’ve been unfairly hit by Penguin when they weren’t doing any spam?

“We’ve seen a few cases where we might want to investigate more, but this change hasn’t had the same impact as Panda or Florida,” Cutts said.

The Panda Update was Google’s big update that targeted low-quality spam last year. The Florida Update was a major Google update in 2003 intended to improve its search quality.

I’d agree that both of those seemed to have impacted more sites than Penguin has, based on having watched reactions to all these updates. Not everyone will agree with me, of course. It’s also worth the regular reminder that for any site that “lost” in the rankings, someone gained. You rarely hear from those who gain.

Bottom line, Google seems pretty confident that the Penguin Update is indeed catching people who were spamming, as was intended.

Why Spam Still Gets Through

Certainly when I’ve looked into reports, I’ve often found spam at the core of why someone dropped. But if Penguin is working, why are some sites that are clearly spamming still getting through?

“No algorithm is perfect. While we’d like to achieve perfection, our litmus test is, ‘Do things get better than before?’,” Cutts said.

Cutts also explained that Penguin was designed to be quite precise, to act against pages when there was an extremely high-confidence of spam being involved. The downside is that some spam might get through, but the upside is that you have fewer false positives.

How Can You Recover?

One of the most difficult things with this update is telling people how to recover. Anyone hit by Penguin was deemed to be spamming Google.

In the past, if you spammed Google, you were told to file a reconsideration request. However, Google’s specifically said that reconsideration requests won’t help those hit by Penguin. They’ll recover naturally, Google says, if they clean the spam up.

However, one of the main reasons I’ve seen when looking at sites hit by Penguin seems to be bad linking practices. People have used sponsored WordPress themes, or poor quality reciprocal linking, have purchased links or participated in linking networks, such as those recently targeted by Google.

How do people pull themselves out of these link networks, if perhaps they don’t have control over those links now?

“It is possible to clean things up,” Cutts said, and he suggested people review two videos he’s done on this topic:

Click here to view the embedded video.

“The bottom line is, try to resolve what you can,” Cutts said.

Waiting On Penguin To Update Again

If you do clean things up, how will you know? Ideally, you’ll see your traffic from Google recover, the next time Penguin is updated.

That leads to another important point. Penguin, like Panda, is a filter that gets refreshed from time-to-time. Penguin is not constantly running but rather is used to tag things as spam above-and-beyond Google’s regular spam filtering on a periodic basis.

Is Penguin a site-wide penalty like Panda or page-specific? Cutts wouldn’t say. But given that Panda has site-wide impacts, I think it’s a fair assumption that Penguin works the same.

What that means is that if some of your site is deemed Penguin-like, all of it may suffer. Again, recovery means cleaning up the spam. If you’ve cleaned and still don’t recover, ultimately, you might need to start all over with a fresh site, Cutts said.

New Concerns Over Negative SEO

Before Penguin, talk of “negative SEO” had been ramping up. Since then, it seems to have gotten worse in some places. I’ve seen post-after-post making it sound as if anyone is now in serious danger that some competitor can harm them.

At the core of these fears seems to be a perfect storm of assumptions. Google recently targeted some linking schemes. That caused some people to lose traffic. Google also sent out warnings about sites with “artificial” or “unnatural” links. That generated further concerns in some quarters. Then the Penguin Update hit, which caused more people to lose traffic as they were either hit for link spam or no longer benefited from link spam that was wiped out.

These things made it ripe for people to assume that pointing bad links at a site can hurt it. But as I wrote before, negative SEO concerns aren’t new. They’ve been around for years. Despite this, we’ve not seen it become a major concern.

Google has said it’s difficult for others to harm a site, and that’s indeed seemed to be the case. In particular, pointing bad links at a good site with many other good signals seems to be like trying to infect it with a disease that it has antibodies to. The good stuff outweighs the bad.

Cutts stressed again that negative SEO is rare and hard. “We have done a huge amount of work to try to make sure one person can’t hurt another person,” he said.

Cutts also stressed again what Google said before. Most of the those 700,000 messages to publishers that Google sent out earlier this year were not about bad link networks. Nor were they all suddenly done on the same day. Rather, many sites have had both manual and algorithmic penalties attached to them over time but which were never revealed. Google recently decided to open up about these.

After Negative SEO Campaign, A Link Warning

Of course, new messages do go out, which leads to the case of Dan Thies. His site was targeted by some trying to show that negative SEO works. He received an unnatural link warning after this happened. He also lost some rankings. Is this the proof that negative SEO really works?

Thies told me that his lost rankings were likely due to changes he made himself, when he removed a link across all pages on his site that led back to his home page. After restoring that, he told me, he regained his rankings.

His overall traffic, he said, never got worse. That tends to go against the concerns that negative SEO is a lurking threat, because if it had worked enough to tag his site as part of the Penguin Update, he should have seen a huge drop.

Still, what about link warning? Thies did believe that came because of the negative SEO attempt. That’s scary stuff. He also said he filed three reconsideration requests, which each time returned messages saying that there were no spam actions found. Was he hit with a warning but not one that was also associated with a penalty?

I asked Cutts about the case, but he declined to comment on Thies’s particular situation. He did say that typically a link warning is a precursor to a ranking drop. If the site fixes the problem and does a reconsideration request quickly enough, that might prevent a drop.

Solving The Concerns

I expect we’ll continue to see discussions of negative SEO, with a strong belief by some that it’s a major concern for anyone. I was involved in one discussion over at SEO Book about this that’s well worth a read.

When it’s cheaper to buy links than ever, it’s easy to see why there are concerns. Stories like what happened to Thies or this person, who got a warning after 24,000 links appeared pointing at his site in one day, are worrisome.

Then again, the person’s warning came after he apparently dropped in rankings because of Penguin. So did these negative SEO links actually cause the drop, or was it something else? As is common, it’s hard to tell, because the actual site isn’t provided.

To further confuse matters, some who lost traffic because of Penguin might not be victims of a penalty at all. Rather, Google may have stopped allowing some links to pass credit, if they were deemed to be part of some attempt to just manipulate rankings. If sites were heavily dependent on these artificial links, they’d see a drop just because the link credit was pulled, not because they were hit with a penalty.

I’ve seen a number of people now publicly wishing for a way to “disvow” links pointing at them. Google had no comment about adding such a feature at this time, when I asked about this. I certainly wouldn’t wait around for it now, if you know you were hit by Penguin. I’d do what you can to clean things up.

One good suggestion out of the SEO Book discussion was that Google not penalize sites for bad links pointing at them. Ignore the links, don’t let the links pass credit, but don’t penalize the site. That’s an excellent suggestion for defusing negative SEO concerns, I’d say.

I’d also stress again that from what I’ve seen, negative SEO isn’t really what most hit by Penguin should probably be concerned about. It seems far more likely they were hit by spam they were somehow actively involved in, rather than something a competitor did.

Recovering From Penguin

Our Google Penguin Update Recovery Tips & Advice post from two weeks ago gave some initial advice about dealing with Penguin, and that still holds up. In summary, if you know that you were hit by Penguin (because your traffic dropped on April 24):

Clean up on-page spam you know you’ve done
Clean up bad links you know you’re been involved with, as best you can
Wait for news of a future Penguin Update and see if you recover after it happens
If it doesn’t, try further cleaning or consider starting over with a fresh site
If you really believe you were a false positive, file a report as explained here

Just in, by the way, a list of WordPress plug-ins that apparently insert hidden links. If you use some of these, and they have inserted hidden links, that could have caused a penalty.

I’d also say again, take a hard look at your own site. When I’ve looked at sites, it’s painfully easy to find bad link networks they’ve been part of. That doesn’t mean that there’s not spam that’s getting past Penguin. But complaining about what wasn’t caught isn’t a solution to improving your own situation, if you were hit.

Google Launches “Penguin Update” Targeting Webspam In Search Results

Danny Sullivan — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 21:46:36 +0000

Google has announced that it is releasing a new search algorithm that it hopes will better catch people who spam its search results or purposely do things to rank better that are against Google’s publishers guidelines. Going live today, Google says the “Penguin Update” will impact about 3% of search queries.

From the company’s posts on the Inside Search and Google Webmaster Central blogs:

In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s quality guidelines. This algorithm represents another step in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content.

Fighting Web Spam

What’s “webspam,” as Google calls it, or search spam? Pages that try to gain better rankings through things like:

Our search engine spam penalties page explains more about these types of common spam.

Did Google Already Fight Spam? Yes, But…

The web spam techniques above aren’t new. Some of them are more than 10 years old and date back to before Google even operated as a search engine. So why is Google only now going after such methods?

It’s not, even though the blog post might give some newcomers that impression. Google’s warned about and fought against such techniques for ages. Rather, what’s really happening is that Google is rolling out better ways that it hopes to detect such abuses.

Despite warning against such spam techniques, it’s easy to find cases where they still work. It’s enough to make some long-time “white hat” SEOs feel foolish arguing that people should avoid spamming Google when it seems to pay-off, as I wrote about recently.

“We’ve heard a lot of solid feedback from SEOs who are trying to do the right thing and who don’t want to see webspam techniques rewarded, and we feel the same way,” said Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team.

How’s Google improved its spam filters? No surprise here, Google’s not saying.

Targeting Spam, Not “Over-Optimization”

Somewhat related, is this the “over-optimization” penalty that Cutts warned was coming last month? Yes and no. It is the update he was talking about, but Cutts is clarifying that now somewhat infamous over-optimization statement.

“I think ‘over-optimization’ wasn’t the best description, because it blurred the distinction between white hat SEO and webspam. This change is targeted at webspam, not SEO, and we tried to make that fact more clear in the blog post,” Cutts told me.

By the way, if you’re looking for a catchy name for this update as Google has sometimes given other ones like the Panda Update, bad news. Officially, Google is calling it the “webspam algorithm update,” the company told me.

Postscript: Google has now released a name, so we’ve updated the story headline. See our follow-up post, The Penguin Update: Google’s Webspam Algorithm Gets Official Name

SEO Continues To Be Encouraged

Indeed, today’s post makes a point of contrasting “white hat SEO” against “black hat webspam” and encourages people to continue with SEO best practices:

Our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics….

Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings….

We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites.

3% Of Queries Impacted

Is this update the reason behind ranking drops that many reported last week? Google had already said the cause of that was due to a problem with a parked domains classifier and reconfirms that today’s new spam fighting algorithm update was not part of last week’s changes.

Google says the new update will impact about 3.1% of queries in English; 3% in German, Chinese and Arabic. The percentage might be higher for languages where spam has been slipping through even more, such as in Polish, where 5% of queries are expected to change.

Postscript: See our follow-up stories:

Faking A Breadcrumb Trail To Stand Out On Google

Barry Schwartz — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:40:56 +0000

Google Rich Snippets are an outstanding way for webmasters to get more exposure for their pages in the Google search results. Using them, you can add add images, review stars and more to your listings. But for some webmasters, that is not enough.

Back in November I noticed HTML entities working in Google’s breadcrumb rich snippets, and I am a bit shocked to see they still work. A reader anonymously sent us another example, showing the breadcrumb rich snippets with stars. It reads SEO ★★★★★ Rated!

Here is a screen shot, I tried to hide the offending site the best I could:

In the above example, it might come across as Google looking to vouch that this SEO company is 5 star rated. But no, it is not. This is a webmaster who figured out a way to trick Google in thinking this is a breadcrumb trail, that there’s a page called “SEO ***** Rated” on the site.

We continue to get reports of how publishers are using rich snippets in ways Google may have not wanted. In fact, a few months ago Google launched a rich snippet spam reporting tool because of the increase levels of spam being submitted through rich snippets.

In the past couple weeks, several blogs have come out with their distaste of rich snippet spam including BruceClay.com and John Melborough. But this has been going on since last year and is only getting worse as Google shows more and more rich snippets in the search results.

Google Sending Warnings About “Artificial” Or “Unnatural” Links

Barry Schwartz — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 13:11:24 +0000

Have you recently gotten a warning from Google about having “artificial” or “unnatural” links pointing at your site? Google says this isn’t a fresh crackdown on link networks but rather a change from bad links being “silently distrusted” to being more vocal about this type of penalty.

Warnings Issued

Many people have reported getting messages from Google regarding link violations. If you scan the Google Webmaster Help forums, for instance, you will see many examples of these being posted.

Here is how one reads:

Dear site owner or webmaster of ….

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

Links No Longer “Silently Distrusted”

Last month, Google appeared to take action against several blog/link networks. Are the messages going out because of that? Google told us no. Rather, it is that Google’s choosing to report penalties about bad linking issues more now than in the past.

A Google spokesperson emailed this statement:

The majority of the increase in messages to webmasters is not due to messages about links. Rather, Google recently started sending messages to sites even for egregious or “blackhat” violations of our quality guidelines. The vast majority of the increase in messages is thus due to expanding the types of messages we send, not because of more warnings about links.

It is true that actions on link networks have been more visible lately, but there’s an important disclaimer to that. Google has been able to trace and take action on many types of link networks; we recently decided to make that action more visible. In the past, some links might have been silently distrusted or might not have carried as much weight. More recently, we’ve been surfacing the fact that those links aren’t helping to improve ranking or indexing.

Earlier this year, Google said that it significantly increased the number of messages they have sent through Webmaster Tools in 2012.

Google Eliminates Another Link Network, BuildMyRank.com – Just One Of Several?

Barry Schwartz — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:16:06 +0000

The battle between Google and those trying to artificially manipulate its search results is an ongoing battle. Google on March 19th took down one of those blog/link networks named BuildMyRank.com.

BuildMyRank.com confirmed Google has deindexed an “overwhelming majority” of their network as of March 19, 2012. The management of BuildMyRank.com has decided to immediately shut down their service and provide refunds to customers.

BuildMyRank.com thought that Google would allow their network since they felt they provided “better quality service,” which was a “bit different from other networks.” But as they admitted on their blog, “this was not the case.”

On one hand, I am surprised so many people still participate in quick and easy tactics like this? Google has a long history of going after link and blog networks. Here is just one more example. But I guess when things seem to work and it is easy, a human will often go with it. Even though network after network has been hit by the paid link penalties and worse.

Jennifer Ledbetter at PotPieGirl has a lot more on this network being hit by Google on her blog. It might also just be one of several networks hit.

Digital Due Diligence, it its latest newsletter, pointed to Niche Pursuits mentioning that some other networks may have been hit, as well as two forum discussions about this.

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

Too Much SEO? Google’s Working On An “Over-Optimization” Penalty For That

Barry Schwartz — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 16:12:19 +0000

Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Google is working on a search ranking penalty for sites that are “over-optimized” or “overly SEO’ed.”

Matt announced this during a panel Search Engine Land’s Editor-In-Chief, Danny Sullivan and Microsoft’s Senior Product Marketing Manager of Bing at SXSW named Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better!. The audio for the session has been published where I learned that Google has been working on a new penalty that targets site’s that overly optimize for search engines for the past few months.

Matt Cutts said the new over optimization penalty will be introduced into the search results in the upcoming month or next few weeks. The purpose is to “level the playing field,” Cutts said. To give sites that have great content a better shot at ranking above sites that have content that is not as great but do a better job with SEO.

Here is the audio clip, you can find Matt saying this about 1/3rd the way in. (Note: We’ve expanded it from what we originally posted,

Here is the transcription (note: we’ve expanded this from what we originally posted, based on Rob Snell’s transcription of the entire session):

The way that I often think about SEO is that it’s like a coach. It’s someone who helps you figure out how to present yourself better. In an ideal world, though, you wouldn’t have to think about presenting yourself and whether search engines can crawl your website, because they’d just be so good that they can figure out how to call through the Flash, how to crawl through the forums, how to crawl through the JavaScript, how to crawl through whatever it is.

And, for the most part, most search engines have made a lot of progress on being able to crawl though that richer content.

Now, what’s interesting about your question is you went a little bit deeper and you said, “Well, what about all the people who are sort of optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO?” And, uh, normally we don’t sort of pre-announce changes, but there is something that we’ve been working on in the last few months. And hopefully, in the next couple months or so, in the coming weeks, we hope to release it.

And the idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, “over optimization” or “overly” doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little bit more level.

And so that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the web site, uh Google Bot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive so that people don’t do SEO, we handle that, and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on the page, or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they are doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area. So that is something where we continue to pay attention and we continue to work on it, and it is an active area where we’ve got several engineers on my team working on that right now.

In 2009, Matt did a video on over optimization penalties saying there was no such thing. Here is that video:

This is the latest penalty related algorithm Google is working on since releasing the Pages With Too Many Ads “Above The Fold” Now Penalized By Google’s “Page Layout” Algorithm.

We reached out to Google about the new over optimization penalty but Google told us they have nothing to say at this present time. Maybe we’ll hear more when Cutts speaks during the “You&A With Matt” session at our upcoming SMX Advanced show in Seattle this June.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: See my follow-up analysis on the news here, Is Google’s “Over Optimization Penalty” Its “Jump The Shark” Moment In Web Search?

Google Chrome’s Paid Link Penalty Now Lifted

Barry Schwartz — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 13:37:25 +0000

Google has lifted the 60-day paid link penalty Google Chrome was given the first week of January.

Now if you search for [chrome], [browser] or similar searches, the Google Chrome landing page will once again show up on the first page of the search results.

Here is a picture showing the page ranking in position number for on Google:

As you may remember, right after the New Years, Google was caught running a sponsored post campaign for Chrome. After a day or so, Google’s Matt Cutts applied a link penalty to the Google Chrome landing page for 60 days. Now, about days later, Google lifted the penalty.

A Google representative confirmed the penalty has been lifted.

Google told us in January:

We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days. We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users.

While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.

Hat tip to Tamir Oron from SEO Israel.

Chrome’s Market Share Drops In January; Was It Due To Google’s Penalty?

Matt McGee — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:05:21 +0000

After 17 straight months of gains in market share, Google’s Chrome web browser dropped 0.17 percent in January, and the company that tracks browser market share suggests that it’s because Google penalized Chrome after a botched sponsored blog post campaign.

The figures come from Net Applications, which says it tracks about 160 million unique visits per month to a worldwide network of more than 40,000 sites.

According to Net Applications, Firefox and Safari also saw market share losses in January. While they were declining, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer gained 1.09%, its biggest monthly gain in at least two years.

One possible explanation is that a lot of people bought new PC computers over the holidays, and Internet Explorer’s market share grew in January because it’s the default browser there. But that didn’t happen a year ago; in January 2011, Explorer’s market share declined nearly a full percent. (IE did gain in February, 2011, as shown above.)

Net Applications ties Explorer’s gain and Chrome’s decline to the Google penalty which removed Chrome from search results for a number of browser-related search terms. Google penalized Chrome in early January after the company’s own botched sponsored blog post campaign ran afoul of Google’s search/webmaster guidelines.

In my searches this morning, the main Chrome page doesn’t appear on page one for “browser,” “web browser,” “download web browser,” “chrome,” “google chrome” nor “chrome browser.” I’m not sure that’s why Chrome’s market share dropped in January, but it’s an interesting theory to consider at minimum.

(tip via Computerworld)

Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty

Danny Sullivan — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:32:31 +0000

Searches for “browser” no longer bring up the Google Chrome home page after Google applied a penalty against the page because of Google’s own sponsored post campaign.

Google said even though it felt there were no “remaining violations” of its guidelines, the search engine’s spam fighting team was going to reduce the PageRank value of the Google Chrome home page, which in turn lead to today’s ranking decrease.

From the statement Google sent us:

We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days.

We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users.

While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.

Lower PageRank Value Doesn’t Equal Banning

At the time the statement was originally sent, around 1:30 PT today, the page had a publicly-reported PageRank value of 9. The highest you can have is 10.

One tool I used reported the non-https version of the page as having a PageRank of zero. Another check with the Google Toolbar shows it still at 9. However, it’s common that PageRank values shown to the public may be behind, sometimes months behind, the scores that Google is actually using.

Lowering the PageRank value is not the same as removing or banning the page from Google. Potentially, however, a lower PageRank value will reduce its ability to rank well for certain terms. That’s what’s happened as a result of this.

Will It Still Rank?

When the statement was initially received, the Chrome home page still ranked for searches on chrome, google chrome and the generic term of browser, as you can see below:

I wrote in the earlier version of this story:

Chances are, even with the PageRank reduction, the page will continue to rank for these terms. However, if it were to fall out of the first page of results for “browser,” or to something lower than its current number two position that I see, then the penalty will have had some real teeth….

If that penalty doesn’t cause some type of ranking reduction, then it’s not really much of a penalty at all. The separate issue of Google’s campaign creating garbage posts remains, but that’s a penalty that’s typically applied to the garbage post themselves.

No, It Will Not

Now that has happened for a search on “browser,” as you can see below:

That’s the first page of results for “browser” on Google now. Previously, Chrome has been ranked number two. Now you have to go to the fifth page of results to find it, ranked in position 50:

NOTE: Only about a half-hour after writing this, we’ve also seen the page sink to as low at 73.

In fact, the page no longer ranks for “chrome” or for “chrome browser,” either. Instead, of the Chrome home page that looked like this showing up first:

It’s the Chrome installation help page that gets top billing:

The main download page does still make it in the top results, but it has been demoted in both cases to “sitelink” status as you can see here:

John Doherty emailed me that he’d run some ranking checks on other terms before the change happened. Here’s the shift from what he recorded to what I see now:

internet browser, dropped from 5th to 58th
web browser, dropped from 4th to 54th

A Solid Slap

Overall, only one page in the sponsored post campaign was ever spotted with a “straight” link that passed credit to the Chrome page. It also didn’t seem as if the campaign overall was designed to help Chrome rank for any particular terms. It was doing fine on its own before this happened.

But technically, even that single link was enough to make Google guilty of buying paid links, even if it happened because of two different agencies being involved. Minor technical violation or not, I’d say Google applied a solid penalty against itself, one that should last for at least 60 days.

But If Google Can’t Figure Things Out…

To me, the bigger issue in this has always been the garbage content that was produced by the campaign, “thin” material that Google has fought to keep out of its own search results. I’m still trying to understand how Google failed to understand that the marketing companies it engaged with would produce this.

Given how much detail Google professes to put into its marketing, as I covered yesterday, it still remains amazing that the company found itself involved with this type of campaign.

It also raises the serious question that if Google can’t keep track of its own rules, what hope is there that third parties are supposed to figure it all out?

I hate to write that, because the last thing I want is for a Google screw-up to be an excuse for anyone to do the type of “marketing” that Google did. But it’s also true.

Postscript: The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, has shared some comments on Google+ though he’s on vacation. He confirms that the video player links didn’t pass any link credit, but because they found at least one non-video player link that did, that was deemed sufficient to take action against Google. From his post:

If you investigated the two dozen or so sponsored posts (as the webspam team immediately did), the posts typically showed a Google Chrome video but didn’t actually link to Google Chrome. We double-checked, and the video players weren’t flowing PageRank to Google either.

However, we did find one sponsored post that linked to www.google.com/chrome in a way that flowed PageRank. Even though the intent of the campaign was to get people to watch videos–not link to Google–and even though we only found a single sponsored post that actually linked to Google’s Chrome page and passed PageRank, that’s still a violation of our quality guidelines, which you can find at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3 .

In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.

(Stock image via Shutterstock. Used under license.)

Google: Yes, Sponsored Post Campaign Was Ours But Not What We Signed-Up For

Danny Sullivan — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:02:31 +0000

It’s been about a day since we covered Google’s sponsored post campaign to promote its Chrome browser, a campaign that produced posts that violate Google’s guidelines against “thin” content and potentially those against buying links. Yes, it was a Google campaign, but not what the company says it signed-up for. One agency is falling on its sword; another is saying no paid links were purchased. Let’s piece through what we’ve got.

Google: We Only Meant To Buy Online Ads

Google has sent me this statement:

Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.

That seems odd, at first, because it has become clear that Google was behind a campaign that paid bloggers to promote its Chrome product. Otherwise, the web wouldn’t be littered with all these posts that say “This post sponsored by Google.”

Essence Digital: Google Thought They Were Buying Video Ads

The email I received from Google also pointing to a statement from Essence Digital, a New York/London digital media agency. The statement:

There’s been some recent attention in the news involving a Google campaign (see linked article). Here’s some context on what happened.

We want to be perfectly clear here: Google never approved a sponsored-post campaign. They only agreed to buy online video ads. Google have consistently avoided paid postings to promote their products, because in their view these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users.

In this case, Google were subjected to this activity through media that encouraged bloggers to create what appeared to be paid posts, were often of poor quality and out of line with Google standards. We apologize to Google who clearly didn’t authorize this.

In other words, Google seems to have contracted with Essence Digital to have a video ad campaign be run across the web. Apparently, Google had no idea how Essence Digital was going to actually run the campaign or make the video ads appear across the web.

Why Did Google Need An Outside Firm To Buy Video Ads?

Why Google needed an agency to do this for them is really weird, since Google’s own video ad network is a pretty effective way to place video ads across the web and in far more places that this campaign did.

So, a big question here remains: what exactly did Essence Digital promise to Google? What was so compelling about its pitch that Google wanted to go for it?

Unruly: We Didn’t Ask For Links & Don’t Care About Them

Meanwhile, as best I can tell, Essence Digital didn’t actually implement the campaign. Instead, video promotion company Unruly was used, as I suspected when writing my story last night. Unruly’s been in touch with me to say:

As Andrew Girdwood points out, Unruly never requires bloggers to link to back to an advertiser’s site. That’s because we’re in the business of video advertising not search engine marketing, so we couldn’t care less about link juice. We don’t ask for it, we don’t pay for it, and we don’t track it.

In line with FTC and EU regulation Unruly always requires that bloggers clearly disclose any post, tweet, or other reference to the video as being sponsored and we provide guidance on how to do this. We also request that if they do link anywhere they use nofollow, both because that’s best practice and also because it’s in their own interest to do so.

Unruly is committed to an ethical, legal, and totally transparent approach to online marketing. It’s crucial that posts are clearly marked as sponsored and that links are marked as nofollow. And it’s crucial that opinions belong to the author, which is why we never push an angle or opinion, and also why, occasionally, bloggers will unfortunately pen a post that deviates from our guidelines, as here. Where that happens, we’re very happy to have it pointed out and will cure the infraction as fast as possible.

As I said in the story, I didn’t expect that Unruly would ask bloggers to link to the site. No smart company trying to buy links would do that, hoping instead that it would just happen naturally.

Unruly Doesn’t Care About “Link Juice” But Has Terms About PageRank?

However, to say that “we couldn’t care less about link juice” is obviously not true. In Unruly’s terms and conditions, as I wrote about yesterday, there’s this statement:

Monthly earnings caps for Your Site(s) are determined by the Google PageRank of each Site and such other factors as Unruly Media may consider form time to time. You will be notified by email when one of Your Site(s) is approaching its monthly limit and again when the limit is reached;

There’s no reason to talk about payment based on Google PageRank unless you expressly care about link juice. It is Google’s own measure of the ability for a page to pass along link juice. But a comment from my earlier post from who seems to be Unruly CEO Scott Button addresses this:

On the reference to PageRank in our Ts&Cs, Unruly uses a number of data sources and statistical techniques, that may include PageRank checks, to protect our advertisers from low quality video views. These measures are in place to protect the revenues of high quality sites and to ensure that views of the video represent genuine user interest – they have nothing to with search engine marketing

OK, but it’s hard to argue that Google was delivered high-quality views from the campaign that was just run, I’d say. Also interesting, I’m virtually certain this section of the Unruly terms was added after my story was posted:

where you write an editorial post linking to or embedding a Branded Video any links within this post or associated with it which link to the Advertiser’s website need to be marked with a ‘nofollow’ tag in accordance with Google guidelines. Any infraction of this rule may result in any payment being suspended or withheld.

I don’t recall seeing this yesterday, because I did a keyword search against this page for both nofollow and Google. I found nothing about nofollow mentioned (otherwise, I’d have written about that). I did find a mention about Google, but only the single one that I noted. The Internet Archive also shows that this wasn’t part of the page last year.

It might be that Unruly, in this particular campaign, wasn’t concerned about gathering up link credit. I’d certainly agree that was probably not the intention.

But in other campaigns, with terms like that, it suggests that Unruly is trying to buying links. That sort of means that Google is potentially doing business with the same type of drug dealer it’s trying to put out of business, though it has an intermediary involved.

JavaScript Might Not Block Link Credit

Unruly also did an interview with AllThingsD, talking about, as in the statement I received, that no one is asked to link, but if they do, they’re asked to use nofollow. Further, the company said, “All links from the video player are wrapped in Javascript, so although Google can follow them, they don’t influence search engine rankings.”

As I covered in my earlier story, wrapping links in Javascript doesn’t necessarily block credit from being passed (and see also here). Only Google can really tell us what the situation is. So, we’re waiting for Google’s spam team to weigh in (which might be delayed, as I know that the head of that team, Matt Cutts, is currently on vacation).

I’m hoping to see both the exact instructions that the bloggers were given, as well as learning more about what exactly Google thought it was buying. It’s likely there’s plenty of wiggle room for Google to claim that if any paid links did end up being purchased, it wasn’t its fault — an excuse that hasn’t saved others from penalties like JC Penney, so the Google Chrome page might still face a ban.

Biggest Issue Remains: Garbage Content

The bigger issue in all this, as I wrote before, is that the campaign produced a lot of garbage content. That doesn’t mean that Google Chrome gets banned. Rather, it’s just embarrassing to Google, when it has been busy trying to prevent this type of content from ranking in its own search engine.

Postscript: See Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty

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