Google has gone through an unprecedented upheaval this month. As we reported on October 24 Google downgraded the page rank of a broad range of blogs.
The scary thing is that they’ve done another page rank update again, the third in a month. This is an unprecedented move by Google; normally they update page rank once every three months, sometimes not that often. Never before have they done it three times in a month. We originally reported that the changes were related to link farming, but the latest change would suggest that it might be related to paid links, but with Google taking three attempts to get it right.
EnjoyPerth.net is a fairly innocuous blog that posts on events in the capital of Western Australia. The site is a couple of years old, and although it might not be doing amazing numbers, it was well targeted to its niche. Around 70% of EnjoyPerth’s traffic came from Google searches for events in Perth, not an unremarkable number in an age where Google holds 60-90% of the search market depending on which country you are looking at.
2 weeks ago EnjoyPerth was unindexed by Google. When I say unindexed I mean that it totally disappeared from Google. A site search shows that it has been complete removed; you get sites linking in but not the site itself.
So what was EnjoyPerth’s crime? I asked a leading SEO expert who asked to remain nameless, this is what he said:
In my experience Google usually won’t knock you out algorithmically for selling links, someone has to report you or an engineer has to come across you one way or another. While some of the links are travel/Perth related it’s hard to make that claim with things like games and dating. This is a text book example of the two tiered justice system that Google employs. The San Jose Mercury News can sell more links for more money but Google can’t pull them out of the index because it would make them look foolish, but they can certainly pull out lesser known web publishers.
Text link ads have been the bread and butter for many a small blog owner for the last couple of years. Even before Text-Link-Ads.com (a TechCrunch sponsor) the Weblogs Inc network was direct selling text links. In this case of EnjoyPerth sold links, and it may have killed their Google indexation.
I’ve spoken to the owner of EnjoyPerth and she’s going to drop her text link sales and re-submit the site to Google. I can only hope that they are benevolent enough to put the site back into their directory. Overall though an interesting question arises, not just for EnjoyPerth but for all of us: is it healthy that we are all so reliant on Google. Are we better off for Google’s domination? would we be better off with stronger competition? I’d think that at least in EnjoyPerth’s case that the world would have been better without Google’s dominance.
Are we better off for Google’s domination?
Are we better off for any near-monopoly?
The problem is, of course, that most search engines just aren’t as good from the average end user’s point of view. Google is simple, does what it needs to, and is easy to get to. Ask is almost too swish, Live Search somehow looks amateurish despite being built by a huge corporation, Yahoo has too much clutter. The only way to nudge Google off the top spot is to find a new way to search that somehow provides better results, and works faster both from the computing and user points of view. A tall order.
There are many false positives – basically it originates from THIS list.
http://blogosco...rum/110901.html
If Bloggers find these URLs in the referrer archives of their traffic stats – it means that their sites are under suspicion.
It appears that all the spam team members nationwide have access to it as part of a Google Intranet and can comment on the sites being analyzed and added as link sellers
@SearchEnginesWeb
If you start looking on those type of lists, it is a sign that you are doing something you shouldn’t be – no?
We used to say the same thing when newspapers dominated the mainstream media. Technology has changed, but a lot of other things haven’t.
Whoever controls the information, will always have massive power in society. Nothing we can do but play nice with our (hopefully benelovent) dictator.
Simone
Bummer. Not being up to monetizing blogs yet, I don’t catch the full drift of this but it sure seems like a solid slap in the face.
Something similar happened last month as well when Google banned a Page Rank 7 website. [full story]
The Google ban was quickly lifted after the publisher removed the text ads.
Six months time is shorter to scan billions of sites to catch the paid links, I think there are many sites out there still from google radar.
the whole principle behind Google’s punishment of paid links was aimed at sites trying to manipulate rankings – not monetize their website. Not sure how the de-indexing of enjoyperth.net fits this charter…
while it’d be great to think it was a false positive – Simone’s blog has been de-indexed for over 2 weeks…for her sake – i hope they remedy their mistake soon.
It is ok with Google to sell links (advertising in other words) – you just have to use the rel=”nofollow” tag to show that it is not a “vote” for the other site.
They are not banning for text links. They are banning or punishing for text links without rel=”nofollow” in the link code. If you have rel=”nofollow” you are fine. Text Link Ads will not let you put in the rel=”nofollow” which is really the source of the problem.
For those who want to have google reindex their site, or think they are being otherwise punished, once you remove the text links (or add rel=”nofollow” to the link) you can sign up for googles webmaster tools. There is a link on the right side to resubmit your site for review. They will double check you follow their rules and if so let you in.
I had a site that was getting over 1000 hits from google a day, about 90% of my traffic. Then about 2 days ago ive dropped to *maybe* 50 a day if that and didnt sell text links…. not sure whats going on here. They even just gave me a PR2 and then took me out of the results
Welcome to the real net antineutrality??
@Tony/Useful Concept
I was thinking the same thing regarding paid links while reading Riley’s article. I just couldn’t see how Google could be against all paid links. But as you said, it’s not a problem if you add the rel=”nofollow” tag or “No PageRank juice” tag.
So I wonder what Text Link Ads is telling their customers?
Selling text links is fine. As long as they are in your niche.
“Natural” links will point to resources related to the niche of the originating page itself.
If your page is about gerbils and you link to auto-repair, then unless the auto-repair page is talking about removing gerbils from your tailpipe, then that’s a problem.
Your page rank is not pagerank overall for the whole internet, but merely pagerank for those keywords that determine what you niche is. Again, if you have a page about gerbils with a PR7, changing that page to content about elephants, will cause your gerbils page to lose all that rank. Because the original links and page content had to do with gerbils, not elephants.
Its simple. Google wants to see pages linking to related content, not useless random links.
Anyone had a look at the source code for this blog?
Anyone spot anything slightly odd near the bottom?
After the copyright line that you see at the bottom of the blog home page, there appears to be a hidden div with a load of links to a site selling viagra type crap.
80 links, hidden away at the end of the source code, not displayed on screen.
Forgive me for not trusting the word of a nameless ‘leading’ SEO expert who misses that kind of easily spotted stuff.
Maybe the blog owners aren’t to blame, maybe it’s a security problem and they aren’t aware of those links. But c’mon, it took me less 2 minutes to find that. You’re backing up an anti-Google post with evidence that supports Google’s position, as the blog is doing something dodgy.
We experienced a similar story with our site Horsemanship Journal; however, we don’t sell any text links. We monitored our search ranking on keyword “horsemanship” and several weeks ago disappeared from the searches completely. We have no idea why or what changed.
Matt Mullenweg had the same thing happen a while back, something to do with nofollow, his blog was de-indexed and it disappeared from Google until it was re-indexed again. http://photomat...ed-from-google/
Kitta, that wasn’t anything to do with nofollow on link tags, that was to do with the robots meta tag telling search engines not to index the blog…
Here’s my question for Google. If text link ads are so abhorrent, then why does google see fit to profit by selling Google adwords to their purveyors? Check out http://www.goog...q=text+link+ads
Personally, I don’t have a problem with paid text links. Google’s objection is that paying for text links artificially inflates the natural popularity of a site. Is buying $10,000 of text links really any different than paying a PR firm $10,000 to write releases/articles that get picked up around the web? Is one more “natural” than the other? Not in my view.
Adrian: Good call on the post copyright links.
Duncan, make sure Erick Schonfeld doesn’t read your non-pro-Google article. You might have to find a new job.
>As we reported on October 24 Google downgraded the page rank of a broad range of blogs.
Let’s keep our cause and effect straight here. Google updated its page rank algorithm and that resulted on some blogs being downgraded (and, naturally, some sites getting upgraded). Google didn’t go blog by blog and pick and choose which ones to down/upgrade. These changes are disruptive but no site owner should ever assume that a high rank, once achieved, is a right granted in perpetuity.
The problem is that many people on the web sell links and google has determined their fate.
@Adrian: seems to be missing now. Wonder if they were following this thread and removed the offending evidence? If it was “hackers” who did it, I would guess they wouldn’t remove it just because they’d been caught in the act!
Anyone got a cached copy of the hidden div? It’d be nice to see TechCrunch actually follow-up on these kind of posts with a little *journalistic* *research* instead of just re-iterating facts they like to hear.
Hi all, I’m the owner of enjoyperth.net
After reading Adrian’s comment (#14) I obviously looked myself, and was shocked. Got my husband who’s a web designer to find it and remove it, with the help of a friend who is a programmer.
So we’ve been hacked.
I guess it’s great that non-technical web people like myself can easily start blogs like this, but it’s very scary that something like this ended up on my site without me realizing. I’m very embarrassed right now, to say the least!
I would think that changing the pagerank algorithm weekly would be a good way to balance the sites that deserve high PR vs. those that spend all their time tweaking for the current algorithm. A site that gets a high PR consistently, despite the algorithm du jour is one that tends to deserve it, IMO.
>would we be better off with stronger competition?
This isn’t a real question is it?
Simone, well if you’ve now removed the possible reason for the ban, you could file a reinclusion request with Google and see if they reindex you
Search has zero switching costs. ZERO. No lock-in, no retraining (because they all work the same). If you don’t like Google’s algorithm modifications, then switch engines!
It would be nice to give websites a heads up or warning / notice before taking them out of the system as it is apparent that the blog in question had been hacked and didn’t even know that there were a bunch of hidden links on the php pages.
For some reason the Google Analytics script appears twice at the end of the file, once after the /html statement. I wonder whether that inflates the visitor stats (or whether the site id. actually belongs to another site), although google should be smart enough to discount it.
As of now, Google is the biggest thing on the Internet. And with level of influence, I expect them to be more transparent on issues to do with PageRank. They must open a new blog dedicated to PR issues. If you want to get the whole story about what I think, check this link:
http://nthambaz...ransparent.html
Thanks Adrian, and thank you for finding it in the first place. At least one good thing came out of this blog post (oh, I do still think Duncan makes some good points!!). I’ve changed all the passwords and we better upgrade everything.
Btw, I’m such a n00b that I didn’t even know how to view the source code…. Which is wrong, because I guess with having a site comes the responsibility of knowing how things work and what could go wrong… I now need to learn about how sites get hacked, I don’t want this happening again!
Anyway, I already filed a re-inclusion request about 6 hours ago, after I removed the Text Link Ads. It could take a few weeks to be reindexed….
Mmm, maybe I should do it again and mention the issue was probably those spammy links?
I also need sleep, it’s 1am here!
Adrian, I meant meta tag not link tag, as stated in the accompanying blog entry link.
I was pointing out that blog entry to demonstrate how blogs can be hacked without notice, allowing simple things to be changed and then cause problems. Such as Simone found out today.
Google hates Australians!
Look into it, they have praticed system,matic oppression of aussies for years!
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
I think one of the unstated reasons for this strategy is that Google wants to crush upstarts and potential long-term competitors in the bud. Eventually, someone is going to figure out a way to combine paid links with search, and create some kind of “omniblog” that customizes articles according to search on their search engine page. Sort of a combination of Google and a gigantic blog. And what Google is doing now is trying to crush that idea before it can happen.
To Rene Le Merle, comment #7: Doesn’t every site try to “maniplate its rankings” these days? I mean just about EVERY SINGLE COMMERCIAL SITE out there, in every field of business, including small business, tries to do this to some extent. It’s called Search Engine Optimization, and it’s a huge industry… I mean there are, like, 17,000 books on Amazon about SEO or something… How can Google try to thwart this?
Does “indexing the world’s information” seem at odds with dropping a site from the index entirely? Is Google supposed to represent a curated list of sites whose policies (whether in terms of linking or, maybe one day, in terms of politics) they agree?
Duncan,
Post an update already.
I’m just feeling grateful we’ve got Mahalo waiting in the wings to topple Google’s domination.
A gay sports website called Outsports (www.outsports.com) has also completely disappeared from Google. This is getting crazy…
My blog http://blog.crescentshield.com
dropped from PR 4 to PR 0 and no longer shows up on search results for my band name Crescent Shield. I do not sell links or have any text link ads. It’s just a band website/blog. Thanks for screwing us google.
Duncan, I left you a comment but I think TechCrunch rejected it because it contained some words considered bad. I’ll do the comment again without the exact text.
—-
Hi Duncan, I’m the head of the webspam team at Google. This is not an
issue of paid links at all. I’m looking at a version of enjoyperth.net
from October 20th and I see the following links on the page from that
date:
(lots and lots of bad links and text here)
Looks like the site may have been hacked recently, but the links were
there for days and days. If a hacked site is affecting the Google user
search experience, we do reserve the right to remove the hacked site
for a limited time. If the site has removed the hacked links now,
enjoyperth.net should do a reconsideration request in our webmaster
console and I expect it will be reincluded in our index.
Hey there,
First, Simone, I’m sorry that your site was hacked
. It happened a while back to one of my personal sites, too, so I sympathize!
We do make an effort to notify webmasters in these circumstances, and we remove such sites from our index in part because compromised sites/servers often serve malware that is quite harmful to users.
Once sites are cleaned up and any server vulnerabilities dealt with, we’re very happy to promptly add the sites back into our index.
I welcome you (and others in this thread) to check out our Webmaster Central area at http://www.goog....com/webmasters and in particular sign up for a free Webmaster Tools account. This includes a message center where we can communicate important messages like “Hey, it looks like your site has been hacked!” to you, so you don’t have to wonder what happened. The Webmaster Tools is the section where you’ll want to file a reconsideration request from, too.
Laslty, Duncan… it’d be awesome if you’d add an update in your entry to note what happened in this situation. Among other things, that’d help others who might be in similar straits quickly fix their sites and get ‘em back in our index. Thanks!
Ah, Adrian already nailed it in comment # 14.
“A gay sports website called Outsports (www.outsports.com) has also completely disappeared from Google. This is getting crazy…”
@Boomer, that website had hidden text at the bottom of the page in 1pt size. There was only a 30 day penalty for the hidden text, so the site should be back in Google soon. In fact, we also emailed outsports.com to tell them why the site was removed in Google. This is the email that we sent them on October 5th:
“Dear site owner or webmaster of outsports.com,
While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.goog...guidelines.html
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from outsports.com are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.
Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages:
* The following hidden text on outsports.com:
e.g.
Sports and gay athletes and sports fans: information on jocks, sports news and more. We encompass the sporting passions of gay and lesbian sports fans everywhere. Get news and post your opinion.
[...]
We would prefer to have your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be reincluded, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When you are ready, please visit:
https://www.goo...inclusion?hl=en
to learn more and request a reconsideration request.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team”
In addition, outsports.com could have come to our webmaster console to check for penalties and we would have confirmed to them that they had a penalty.
Simone, thanks for removing the hacked links. I’ll check on the reinclusion request on our side.
Best,
Matt
Sorry if I’m late to the game – if I’ve got TextLinkAds.com link ads on my site – Google will now downgrade my PageRank?
Has TLA replied to this and offered a way to add the no follow command?
I couldn’t agree more with you Duncan
Google has a habit of doing what it wants, I for some reason out of the blue one was kicked out of adsense. No warning, just email saying i’m gone. I place over $1m advertising with Google for another site, I asked my ad contacts if they could dig in an get me at least a reason i was ban from adsense and couldn’t even do that.
Well, my website got dropped completely too. Not just page rank but obliterated as the site mentioned here. But I do not have any blogs or paid links. I am still trying to find out what has happened. Started October 4th and missing close to 25,000 hits a day because of it. A monopoly of sort because of pure dominance. And no one tells you why.
Horrible, not a good move by Google, a company whose motto is to ‘not be evil’.
Selling links shouldn’t be a prohibited practice, even with no ‘nofollow’ tag. If Google wants to crack down on link farms and people buying links in bulk purely for Pagerank, go after the directories, or find the sites that are purchasing 100’s of links with no ‘nofollow’ tags.
Don’t go after the businesses that are merely trying to make a living on the internet.