Google Penalized One Article On BBC’s Web Site

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 negatively affecting the rest of your website on a whole.

As you can see, Google will penalize a specific webpage, specific section of a website or even the whole site.

In this case, it seems as if Google only took action on a specific article and not the whole website.

Related Stories

• Google Sends BBC News A Manual Link Penalty Notification
• Google Says No Comment On Why Interflora Was Penalized
• Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty
• Google Now Reports “Practically 100%” Of Manual Actions
• Official: Google On How & When Ranking Penalties Are Removed
• Google Reminds Webmasters: Selling Links Can Lead To PageRank Penalty
• Matt Cutts On Penalties Vs. Algorithm Changes, A Disavow-This-Link Tool & More
• Got A Google Penalty? A Workflow For Managing Google Penalties
• 90 Days Later, J.C. Penney Regains Its Google Rankings
• iAcquire Banned From Google After Link Buying Allegations
• Google Eliminates Another Link Network, BuildMyRank.com – Just One Of Several?

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.