WebProNews

Tag: Penalties

  • Google: Those Unnatural Link Penalties Are About The Product Reviews We Warned You About

    Google: Those Unnatural Link Penalties Are About The Product Reviews We Warned You About

    As previously reported, Google handed out a bunch of penalties over the weekend for unnatural outbound links. Now, the company has clarified that this is directly tied to product reviews that violate its guidelines.

    If you were affected by this, you can’t say you weren’t warned. Beyond this being pretty much common knowledge for years, Google posted a warning of sorts to its webmaster blog last month. In that, it laid out “best practices” for bloggers and companies when it comes to the latter giving the former free products, and the former reviewing them.

    It was this post Google’s John Mueller referenced in response to people complaining in the Google forums (via Search Engine Roundtable). In one thread, he said:

    In particular, if a post was made because of a free product (or free service, or just paid, etc), then any links placed there because of that need to have a rel=nofollow attached to them. This includes links to the product itself, any sales pages (such as on Amazon), affiliate links, social media profiles, etc. that are associated with that post. Additionally, I imagine your readers would also appreciate it if those posts were labeled appropriately. It’s fine to keep these kinds of posts up, sometimes there’s a lot of useful information in them! However, the links in those posts specifically need to be modified so that they don’t pass PageRank (by using the rel=nofollow).

    Once these links are cleaned up appropriately, feel free to submit a reconsideration request, so that the webspam team can double-check and remove the manual action.

    Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable links you to several separate threads in which Mueller responds similarly, but you get the gist.

    Image via iStock

  • Google Penalizes Site It Invests In

    Google Penalizes Site It Invests In

    Google has penalized a company that it backs financially in search results, by taking manual action on it for apparently violating its guidelines.

    Last year, Google launched Google Capital, a growth equity fund to fund growth-stage businesses. The eighth company it invested in was Thumbtack, a site that introduces people to “qualified professionals” in hundreds of categories to help them complete projects. Customers answer questions about their needs, and Thumbtack connects them with these professionals.

    Search Engine Land reports that it has confirmed with Thumbtack that it received a manual action for “unnatural links to your site,” and that it has seen a “huge decline” in Google referrals as a result, which has impacted the leads that the professionals in its network receive. The company also claims to have never paid for any links.

    Those who have analyzed the situation believe this solicitation for links (which someone shared in the Moz Q&A forum) might have something to do with it:

    As others have noted, this might fall into what Google considers a link scheme, which is against its guidelines.

    It has to be embarrassing for Google when it has to penalize a site that it is directly supporting. Still, it’s not as embarrassing as the time Google had to penalize its own Chrome site.

    Images via Thumbtack, Imgur

  • Cutts On Determining If You Were Hit By An Algorithmic Penalty

    If you’ve ever lost your search engine rankings to a competing site, you may have wondered if you were suffering from an algorithmic penalty from Google or if your content simply wasn’t as good as your competitors’. You’re not the only one.

    Google’s Matt Cutts takes on this question in the latest “Webmaster Help” video:

    How can you tell if your site is suffering from an algorithmic penalty, or you are simply being outgunned by better content?

    First he addresses manual penalties. Make sure that’s not what you’re dealing with by checking Webmaster Tools. You’ll get a notification if so, and then you can go from there. He also notes you can learn about crawl errors in WMT. Look for that kind of stuff. But if that seems all well and good, then you might want to think about the algorithm.

    “It’s tough because we don’t think as much or really much at all about algorithmic ‘penalties,’” Cutts says. “Really, the webspam team writes all sorts of code, but that goes into the holistic ranking that we do, and so if you’re affected by one algorithm, you call it a penalty, and if you’re affected by another algorithm, do you not call it a penalty, is a pretty tough call to make, especially when the webspam team is working on more and more general quality changes – not necessarily things specifically related to webspam – and sometimes general quality people work on things that are related to webspam, and so deciding which one to call which is kind of hard to do.”

    Webmasters might get a better idea of what exactly they’re dealing with if Google still provided its monthly lists of algorithm changes, but they think the world was “bored” with those, so they’re not putting them out anymore.

    “We rolled out something 665 different changes to how we rank search results in 2012,” Cutts continues. “So on any given day, the odds that we’re rolling out some algorithmic change are pretty good. In fact, we might be rolling out a couple if you just look at the raw number of changes that we’re doing. However, when we see an algorithmic change that we think will have a pretty big impact, we do try to give people a heads up about that. So for example, the Penguin algorithm, which is targeted towards webspam or the Panda algorithm, which is targeted towards quality content on the web…whenever we have large-scale changes that will affect things, then we tend to do an announcement that ‘Oh yeah, this changed,’ or ‘You should look at this particular date,’ and that can be a good indicator to know whether you’re affected by one of those sort of jolting algorithms that has a big impact.”

    Lately, they’ve mostly been announcing manual penalties, such as on link networks and on guest blogging sites.

    He continues, “What you’ve seen is, for example, Panda has become more and more integrated into indexing, and it’s had less of a jolting impact, and in fact we’ve gotten it so that it changes the index on a pretty regular basis, and it’s build into the index rather than rolling out on a certain day, and so it’s less useful to announce or talk about Panda launches at this point, whereas Penguin is still a switch that flips or is something that starts rolling out at a discreet time, and so we’re a little more willing to talk about those, and let people know and have a little heads up, ‘Hey, you might be affected by the Penguin algorithm.’”

    I think people would still be interested in knowing just when Panda is rearing its head, even if it’s getting “softer” in its old age. Again, even those monthly lists would be helpful. Cutts did say recently that Panda updates happen roughly once a month.

    “In general, if your site is not ranking where you want it to rank, the bad news is it’s a little hard and difficult to say whether you’d call it a penalty or not. It’s just part of ranking,” he says. “The good news is it is algorithmic, and so if you modify your site…if you change your site…if you apply your best guess about what the other site is doing that you should be doing or that it is doing well, then it’s always possible for the algorithms to re-score your site or for us to re-crawl and re-index the site, and for it to start ranking highly again. It’s kind of tricky because we have large amount of algorithms that all interact…”

    A large number of algorithms that webmasters used to get hints about via monthly lists of algorithm updates that Google is no longer providing.

    Image via YouTube

  • If You Experience A Manual Action From Google, You Should Hear About It

    Google’s Matt Cutts, as you may know, spoke at PubCon this week. It’s where he revealed Google’s new Link Disavow tool. That seems to have overshadowed just about everything else from the conference (even the news that PubCon founder Brett Tabke has sold WebmasterWorld), including other things Cutts talked about.

    It’s understandable, as webmasters have been waiting months for the tool to be released, but Danny Sullivan points out another piece of significance from Cutts’ speech. Google now claims to be sending out messages to webmasters for pretty much every manual action it takes on a site. Sullivan reports:

    “We’ve actually started to send messages for pretty much every manual action that we do that will directly impact the ranking of your site,” said Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, when speaking at the Pubcon conference this week.

    “If there’s some manual action taken by the manual web spam team that means your web site is going to rank directly lower in the search results, we’re telling webmasters about pretty much about all of those situations,” he continued.

    Cutts said there might be a rare “corner case” that might not make it but that reporting is “practically 100%” and “the intent is to get to 100%, and as far as I know, we’re actually there.”

    It’s been quite obvious that Google has been sending out many more messages this year than they have historically, but this is good information for webmasters to know, especially since certain activities that are in violation of Google’s quality guidelines could really either be hit by a manual action or an algorithmic action, particularly since Penguin launched.

    I suppose this is all part of Google’s effort to be more transparent, which has also included semi-monthly lists of algorithm changes and more tweeting about major updates in recent weeks.

  • Google Removes Parts Of Penalties If You Make Changes

    Just as you can recover from a Google algorithm update like Penguin, you can bounce back from a penalty as well. In fact, you can even partially bounce back, even if you’re unable to bounce all the way back at once.

    Link buyers, pay attention.

    There’s a discussion in Google’s Webmaster Central forum, discussing Google partially removing penalties, complete with word from a Google representative (hat tip: Barry Schwartz).

    Member T-Harris says his site was hit with a penalty due to inorganic links, that he “removed a great deal of these links, amended anchor text when we had been participating in guest blog posts,” and received a letter from Google’s search quality team saying that after re-evaluating the site’s backlinks, they were able to revoke a manual action.

    Google only considers manual action to be actual penalties, so Penguin victims, don’t get your hopes up, though you can still recover.

    “There are still inorganic links pointing to your site that we have taken action on,” the message said, according to T-Harris. “Once you’ve been able to make further progress in getting these links removed, please reply to this email with the details of your clean-up effort.”

    Google Webmaster Trends analyst, John Mueller (pictured), jumped into the discussion to say:

    That usually means that the team has been able to remove a part of the manual actions being taken due to the changes that you’ve made. It sounds like there still are some issues that you might want to review & resolve though. Generally speaking, it can take a bit of time for these kinds of changes to bubble up, and to be visible in search results, it would be rare to see a jump right afterwards. My recommendation (not knowing the specific case/site) would be to follow the advice of the search quality team and to continue working on removing any unnatural links that your site may have collected over time.

    On that note, Google may soon let webmasters tell it specific links to ignore. Last week, Google said such a tool may become available in the next few months.

    Image: John Mueller’s Google Profile pic

  • Google: If You Care About Your Standing in Search, Don’t Wait Out Penalties

    As previously reported, webmasters with links from paid blog networks that Google recently de-indexed have been receiving letters from Google Webmaster Tools.

    Google’s John Mueller talked a little about such letters and the reconsideration process in a Google Groups thread that you might find interesting (Another good find from the Google Forums by Barry Schwartz).

    “While we have just recently started sending out these messages, they may apply to issues that were already known (and affecting your site’s standing in our search results) for a while,” said Mueller. “If you receive a message like this, and you wish to resolve those issues, then I’d always submit a reconsideration request after having done so. In some cases, you may not be able to resolve all of the issues – if that’s the case, then it’s important to us that you document your efforts (you might even link to a Google Docs file if needed). It’s important to our team that it’s clear that you have taken significant effort to resolve all of the problems in that area, and that they can trust that these kinds of issues will not come back in the future.”

    “In situations where an algorithmic adjustment might have been made, you’re still welcome to submit a reconsideration request. It doesn’t cause any problems to do that, so especially if you’re unsure, submitting one is a good way to be certain,” he says. “Regarding the age of the unnatural links, I’d work to have them all removed, regardless of the age. For instance, in the general case where a site has been buying links for 2 years, it would be a good idea to go back that far.”

    He goes on to say that you should try to wait a penalty out if you’re serious about your site’s standing in search. “These are generally not issues that expire after a few days, they can affect your site’s standing for quite some time,” he says.

    Google’s own Chrome landing page recently had a 60-day penalty, which may have even hurt the web browser’s market share.

  • Less Cash Collected In Overdraft Fees

    A February 2012 study of over 2,000 banks has revealed a decline for overdraft fees collected from lending institutions. As you may remember, 2009 was a record year for banking organizations as they collected over $37 billion in overdraft fees. That’s a sizable stream of income. The numbers from the report which came out today are just over $31 billion. That’s a decrease with turns out to be just around 4.5%.

    Michael Moebs, CEO of Moebs Services who carried out the study, comments on what they found:

    “The average number of overdrafts per account, per year, has fallen from a peak of 10.5 in the 3rd quarter of 2008 by 29.5 percent, to 7.4 almost three years later,”

    “The numbers indicate a fall off in volume, a rise in prices, and a loss of revenue, yet the overall market appears to have bottomed out. Amazingly, given all of the polar forces at play in the overdraft market — volume, price, revenue, a slumping economy, high unemployment, regulator restraint by FDIC, and legislation by Congress — the overdraft market is rising like the mythical phoenix and coming back,”

    So it sounds like people still want the protection of overdraft, and they’re still taking more out of their accounts than what they put in, but their not paying out as much. So nothing has really changes except the fee structure. I don’t know what to think of this.

    Moebs comments about this sentiment:

    “It appears that the American consumer is saying they want overdrafts, but they want them as a reasonably priced safety net overdraft, and NOT an old fashion high penalty priced overdraft.”

    The number of average overdrafts per account has fallen from 9.8 in 2008 to 7.4 in 2012. The average price charged for an overdraft ranges from $25 to $33. The report says most banks are charging $30 and credit unions are charging $25.

    Moebs comments on the fees:

    “More and more banks and credit unions are lowering the price of overdrafts,”

    “This decision bodes well for these institutions as they try to reclaim lost market share to payday lenders, who only charge consumers a median price of $17.50. The closer financial institutions get to payday lenders, the more consumers will bank with Main Street institutions, and rely less on Payday lenders and the mega banks during this difficult economy,”