Google gets tough on link buying domains

Well Google are well and truly on the SEO war path when it comes to cleaning up their search results. A whole raft of recent announcements and actions leave little doubt that they mean business. First of all came the war of words with Matt Cutts of Google writing on the Google blog: "As "pure webspam" has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to "content farms," which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content." This was rapidly followed by the Scraper update targeting plagiarised content. Cutts says: "This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content."

Shortly after came the announcement of the Google Chrome extension that allows users to block any sites they consider as low-quality. In effect the extension means that you are now able to filter your own content. Though criticised for being a reactive, user driven and manual system the argument is that the information collected will likely be integrated into the Google algorithm. In fairness to Google the very recent 'Farmer' update seems to back up this point.

Only live so far in the U.S. The Farmer update has taken a big swipe at the content mills churning out shallow and low quality content significantly reducing the number of top placements for many. Google report that the changes has already had a noticeable impact on nearly 12% of queries. The idea of course is to free up the organic search returns for quality content.

And Google's efforts to rid their search results of invalid or gamed returns haven't stopped there. Grassed up by the New York Times American retail giant JC Penney have felt the force of Google's wrath over the last couple of weeks for a less than white hat link building policy.

Guilty of buying their way to the top of Google on dozens of search terms in the pre Christmas online retail frenzy, JC Penney has now found many of it's page rankings in free fall as Google manually re-calibrate their positioning. What had they done to deserve such severe treatment? As The NY Times reported: "There are links to JCPenney.com’s dresses page on sites about diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, aluminium sheets, travel, snoring, diamond drills, bathroom tiles, hotel furniture, online games, commodities, fishing, Adobe Flash, glass shower doors, jokes and dentists — and the list goes on." Not big and not clever. Other than clever in the sense that such high positioning across so many search terms boosted their Christmas sales in a highly competitive and recession ravaged market place.

Exposed so publicly Google had little choice but to censure the company who straight away went and fired their SEO company claiming complete ignorance to all the underhand link buying shenanigans. Hmmm.

But JC Penney haven't been the only ones caught breaking Google guidelines. The Wall Street Journal have this week reported on another major retailer: Overstock.com. penalized by Google for links it had encouraged on university websites: "The incident, according to Overstock, stemmed in part from its practice of encouraging websites of colleges and universities to post links to Overstock pages so that students and faculty could receive discounts on the shopping site. Overstock said it discontinued the program on Feb. 10, before hearing from Google, but said some university webmasters have been slow to remove the links."

Ouch.

Whilst there has been talk of Google getting tough on gaming example of censure in action have been relatively few and far between. It seems to be heating up out there on several fronts and the message is clear. Play by the rules or face the threat of having your online profile severely compromised in the form of search penalties.

Why take chances? Play nice, play white hat. Build your success on quality content, authentic links and increasingly important, on a strong social reputation. Why run the risk of upsetting Google and missing out on all the success that sustainable internet marketing can offer you?

Contact our SEO specialists at TOP PAGE for quality link building strategies.