You can’t escape from Google-Jail when …
… you’ve boosted your business Web site’s rankings with shitloads of crappy links. The 11th SEO commandment: Don’t promote your white hat sites with black hat link building methods! It may work for a while, but once you find your butt in Google-jail, there’s no way out. Not even a reconsideration request can help because you can’t provide its prerequisites.
When you’re caught eventually –penalized for tons of stinky links– and have to file a reinclusion request, Google wants you to remove all the shady links you’ve spread on the Web before they lift your penalty. Here is an example, well documented in a Google Groups thread started by a penalized site owner with official statements from Matt Cutts and John Müller from Google.
The site in question, a small family business from the UK, has used more or less every tactic from a lazy link builder’s textbook to create 40,000+ inbound links. Sponsored WordPress themes, paid links, comment spam, artificial link exchanges and whatnot.
Most sites that carry these links are in no way related to the penalized site, which deals with modern teak garden furniture and home furniture sets, for example porn galleries, Web designers, US city guides, obscure oriental blogs, job boards, or cat masturbation guides. (Don’t get me wrong. Of course not every link has to be topically related. Every link from a trusted page can pass PageRank, and can improve crawling, indexing, and so on.)
Google has absolutely no problem with unrelated links, unless a site’s link profile consists of way too many spammy and/or unrelated links. That does not mean that spreading a gazillion low-life links pointing to a competitor will get this site penalized or even banned. Negative SEO is not that simple. For an innocent site Google just ignores spammy inbound links, but most probably flags it for further investigations, both manually as well as algorithmically.
If on the other hand Google finds evidence that a site is actively involved in link monkey business of any kind, that’s a completely different story. Such evidence could be massively linking out to spammy places, hosting reciprocal links pages or FFA directories, unskillful (manual|automated) comment spam, signature links and mentions at places that trade links, textual contents made for (paid) link campaigns when reused too often, buying links from trackable services, (link request emails forwarded via) paid-link/spam reports, and so on.
Below is the “how to file a successful reconsideration request when your sins include link spam” from Googlers.
The recommendation from your SEO guy led you directly into a pretty high-risk area; I doubt you really want pages like (NSAW) having sponsored links to your furniture site anyway. It’s definitely possible to extricate your site, but I would make an effort to contact the sites with your sponsored links and request that they remove the links, and then do a reconsideration request. Maybe in the text of your reconsideration request, I’d include a pointer to this thread as well.
You may want to consider what you can do to help clean up similar [=spammy] links on other people’s sites. Blogs and newspaper sites such as http://media.www.dailypennsylvanian.com sometimes receive short comments such as “dont agree”, apparently only for a link back to a site. These comments often use keywords from that site instead of a user name, perhaps “tree bench” for a furniture site or “sexy shoes” for a footwear site. If this kind of behavior might have taken place for your site, you may want to work on rectifying it and include some information on it in your reconsideration request. Given your situation, the person considering your reconsideration request might be curious about links like that.
Translation: We’ll ignore your weekly reconsideration requests unless you’ve removed all artificial links pointing to your site. You’re stuck in Google’s dungeon because they’ve thrown away the keys.
I’d guess that for a site that has filed a reinclusion request stating the site was involved in some sort of link monkey business, Google applies a more strict policy than with a site that was attacked by negative SEO methods. I highly doubt that when caught red-handed a lame excuse like “I didn’t create those links” is a tactic I could recommend, because Googlers hate it when an applicant lies in a reinclusion request.
Once caught and penalized, the “since when do inbound links count as negative votes” argument doesn’t apply. It’s quite clear that removing the traces (admitted as well as not admitted shady links) is a prerequisite for a penalty lift. And that even though Google has already discounted these links. That’s the same as with penalized doorway pages. Redirecting doorways to legit landing pages doesn’t count, Google wants to see a 410-Gone HTTP response code (or at least a 404) before they un-penalize a site.
I doubt that’s common knowledge to folks who promote their white hat sites with black hat methods. Getting links wiped out at places that didn’t check the intention of inserted links in the first place is a royal PITA, in other words, it’s impossible to get all shady links removed once you find your butt in Google-jail. That’s extremely uncomfortable for site owners who fell for questionable forum advice or hired a promotional service (no, I don’t call such assclowns SEOs) applying shady marketing methods without a clear and written warning that those are extremely risky, fully explained and signed by the client.
Maybe in some cases Google will un-penalize a great site although not all link spam was wiped out. However, the costs and efforts of preparing a successful resonsideration request are immense, not to speak of the massive loss of traffic and income.
As Barry mentioned, the thread linked above might be interesting for folks keen on an official confirmation that Google -60 penalties exist. I’d say such SERP penalties (aka red & yellow cards) aren’t exactly new, and it plays no role to which position a site penalized for guideline violations gets downranked. When I’ve lost a top spot for gaming Google, that’s kismet. I’m not interested in figuring out that 20k spammy links get me a -30 penalty, 40k shady links result in a -60 penalty, and 100k unnatural links qualify me for the famous -950 bashing (the numbers are made up of course). If I’d spam, then I’d just move on because I’d have already launched enough other projects to compensate the losses.
PS: While I was typing, Barry Schwartz posted his Google-Jail story at SE Roundtable.
|
Share/bookmark this: del.icio.us • Google • ma.gnolia • Mixx • Netscape • reddit • Sphinn • Squidoo • StumbleUpon • Yahoo MyWeb Subscribe to  Entries Comments All Comments
|
36 comments Sebastian | Reciprocal Links, Webspam, Risky Linkage, Spam Report, SEO, Paid Links, Google
