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.

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About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.