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The funny thing is that it was probably Lyndoman himself who wrote that apology and now even has MC linking to the site. Legendary stuff I tell you! This whole episode is just too funny for words. As if anyone expected a different outcome like SEO's agreeing on a topic LOL
Harith, for someone so against spam, asking people to vote on your story here on Sphinn seems exactly like someone asking for Diggs on Twitter, one of the three points highlighted by MC as to why this story was a problem. See how quickly something goes from black/white to gray? Hopefully you'll consider yourself a little less whitehat now ....
Don’t burn your credibility by using fake stories. It's a short-term tactic and makes people trust you less in the future.
Seems the majority of Americans disagrees with that or GWB would never have been re-elected...
An April Fool isn't an April Fool if, on April 2 you don't somehow let the gullble into the fact that they have been fooled. That's how April Fools have always worked - the gotcha moment. We know when the BBC does it to us - like the 'smellable website' joke a couple of years ago.
There has so far been no gotcha moment on Lyndon's piece. We only know about it cause it was on his blog - the wider community still has no idea and seems never will.
You mean kind of like how Google still doesn't have anything like that on http://google.com/virgle/ ? Give me a break. Both that and Lyndon's story are CLEARLY fake. If anyone is stupid enough to believe either, they need to have their brains re-examined. Just because one happens to have been made up on the 1st of April doesn't mean their back links should be valued any more or less than another piece. Or maybe the links to CNN/Google News/Fox articles about WMD should also be de-valued? That was also a made up story spun by a few PR people and hyped beyond belief. A lot more people bought that hoax than Lyndon's. And I do wager a bet that that story affected a few more people negatively than Lyndon's story...
Too many people here (and at G) seem to see the world in black and white and just conveniently forget all the shades of grey that actually make up the society they live in. Must be nice for them, but I prefer reality. And reality is that Lyndon's a bloody genius for what he did here.
What I wonder is when someone will out wikipedia for selling follow'd links. I mean, if paying to use wikimedia software will guarantee you x thousand follow'd back-links then maybe Google should be penalizing wikipedia instead? The fact that the buyer is a commercial entity filing for a stock market listing and who are using the link juice nicely to boost their other sites just adds to this mess. As an 'objective' site, surely this kind of thing goes against the core of Wikipedia anyway?
Story: Google's Position 6 Penalty
That should teach the doubters that these type of penalties really do exist. There's too many people blowing them off as conspiracy theories when there's ample reason to assume something is triggering them. Interesting to see G admitting to this behaviour (read:a mistake) in their algos too. Wonder how much money it cost those webmasters in the months the 'behaviour' was present....
Story: Google's Position 6 Penalty
Sure it makes a difference from that viewpoint Halfdeck, but at what stage could you say with absolute certainty to your client that it was a mistake by Google and not a 'penalty'? Only after Google confirmed it of course. The -950 is confirmed by Matt Cutts as well and yet there's still people walking around saying it doesn't exist. That's just dumb.
Note that the point in my initial comment was not to say that this is a penalty but rather to highlight that it's annoying that some people are ALWAYS saying drops are NOT penalties. Sure, it's equally annoying to have someone post in WMW or GG that their site dropped a few places and ask how to get the 'penalty' lifted, but there's too many SEO automatically dismissing every single one of these posts just because they don't believe in a -950/-30/-5 penalty/filter/Google f**king up theory. I really don't care what people call them, but I think there's ample evidence around of quality sites dropping roughly these amount of spots in the serps and analyzing that can only be a good thing for everyone. If it hadn't been analyzed and brought up, who is to say how long MC and Google wouldn't have figured it out/noticed it in this case?
Apologies for the rant, but it pisses me off when people automatically assume Google must be right and the webmaster wrong when the webmaster comes looking for help. The term 'brown nose' comes to mind and sadly it's only too common. It sucks to be a newbie and post in SEO forums and get chewed out for something that does end up being a google glitch. Not to mention the fact that some webmasters probably lost a good chunk of money to this glitch.
Disclosure; I was not affected by this at all and I certainly don't consider myself a newbie :)
Aaron should come out saying what "Google considers blackhat". He's currently being labeled a blackhat, which although it might be right, might also be a case of Google going a little overboard. Regardless, I'm pretty sure Aaron must have had at least a vague idea what he was doing wrong as he never claimed to be 100% clean; just 95%. He must have known all along there was this stuff he had done/was doing that could be causing this. No one is that close to their sites that they don't see that kind of stuff.
It'd also be good if Matt could come out and say that you don't have to be doing black hat stuff to end up where Aaron ended up. It took 6 months for us to get an answer from Google that one section of a million page site was tanking the rest of the site.... nice. And the only thing 'wrong' with those pages were that they were making it as easy as possible for users to book something, rather than adding clutter from the rest of the site to them.
I think adsense is actually the least of worries. Imagine all those advertisers paying for msn bot related clicks!! Hang on, does that explain Google's jump in quarterly earnings? :)
Am I the only one sensing the irony in how something that has so long widely been regarded as 'dead' by so many is now causing the seo blogosphere to explode with posts?
That's not the only irony. It hasn't done anything to anyone's traffic, so why the huge fuss?
Interestingly enough, sites like daringfireball.net haven't regained their lost px yet, even though they don't sell text links (unless the DECK is now considered that!). More food for the manual theory there I'd say :)
I've read about this before, but I'm not sure whether Sebastian's article is actually intended with the sarcasm I am reading it in. Surely this is EXACTLY the kind of behaviour that Google and other search engies do NOT want web developers to get involved in? Or do they just figure anyone buying links and not checking this actually deserves it?
I'd say best strategy long term is to show your users, advertisers and search engines the same thing.
Works for me too, although it didn't yesterday. I've blocked a few links (had 8 as well, but only 5 show) to see how that works. I'm also 'blocking' one that was actually showing in hope of changing the title (one of the options). I'm not entirely sure whether this will mean that one is blocked and a new one with correct title pops up, but the blocking can be undone it seems. I blocked at 10.15 local time, so will try and see how long it takes to filter through to the actual serps...
Tim, I've only ever had 4 showing on Google search (besides of course the normal link). When logging in I found G suggesting 8. The one that I blocked that has been visible is still visible, so no change in first 12 hours.
You can see the links in this screenshot: http://www.travellerspoint.com/photos/stream/photoID/172331/users/Sam%20I%20Am/
It's the destinations one I'm trying to get changed. If they really do increase the number of sitelinks to 8 I'll also of course be unblocking the login and signup ones as I figure it's better to have those there than 2 less, right?! :)
Okay, looks like it took 8 days and a few hours to get the sitelinks removed. I just checked and there are currently only 5 showing for us, the three that are gone being exactly the three I removed :) Going to unblock at least one now to see if it comes back with the correct text this time.
So, even though a page is robots.txt'd out, it could be accumulating PR if you are not nofollowing the actual link to that page? That's pretty counter-intuitive and thus definitely an interesting read.
Come on, how about sites like seroundtable then? The guys from G visit regularly and they are clearly selling text links yet don't suffer themselves (although I guess whoever is buying probably does). If you're going to penalize, penalize all. Whilst Danny mentions the old lawsuit on this, a new one could probably be filed along the lines of "discrimination" if this really starts becoming the norm, especially if you're not warned about a penalty. You do not have to have a paid product to still be held liable for discrimination....
I think shoemoney was right. Don't make Google look bad...
Adam, no offense intended, but when you say "I totally understand and support tough-but-fair evaluation of our methods, but at the end of day, I'd hope the majority of folks here would agree with our goals of aiming for a more leval playing field on the web as well as a greater surfacing of quality content." it is extremely belittling imho.
The whole we hope you agree with us thing did use to work, but there's been too many curveballs for that to sit very well nowadays. How can you randomly penalize sites but not others for doing EXACTLY the SAME thing and in the same breath talk about levelling the playing field. We know it, you know it, everyone that reads this knows it, it is not possible {period}
Either penalize them all, or don't penalize any or make it clear what will or won't get you penalized. You're opening up the company to a bucketload of legal action, not to mention the fact that several quality resources have already been penalized and thus the relevancy of Google results has started to slide . An example, although I wouldn't call it a quality site, is that you can't find John Chow when you search for him by name; for the average surfer that means Google can't find the dudes website which makes you guys look incredibly incompetent.
@ Adam, small pet pieve; when there's still 3 outstanding answers due by googlers by the end of the day in the popular picks thread, wouldn't this kind of information make for a really useful post in oh let's say those same google webmaster groups?? I have nothing against Danny, but if you want people to really sit up and listen and make this information official, it should be coming out of Google. Danny hasn't started working for you *yet*, has he? :)
Great post. In addition, the one example Matt Cutts has given for a site supposedly penalized for paid links turned out to be a question of cloaking. Cloaking, totally nothing to do with paid links.
Add to the list the many examples of SEO sites that clearly sell text links AND are visited by Matt Cutts (seroundtable for example) and there is essentially more evidence that they don't penalize than that they do. I doubt it's the 302 though but that's another topic.
Hmm, sorry, was trying to actually comment on an article over at searchengineland and NOT add a duplicate of what is already being discussed over at http://sphinn.com/story/6594
This new commenting system of searchengineland is obviously way too complicated for me :)
Story: Oh my God Dmoz is Gone!!!!
So essentially IF Matt's post on what Googlebot encountered was not Googlebot getting it totally wrong, then DMOZ has to have been cloaking it to serve it only to Google (and possibly other search engines). Otherwise tons more people would have noticed the redirecting issue because it effectively closes down that page - I've done it before when testing :)
DMOZ/AOL, please weigh in on this. It'd be interesting to find out if googlebot just royally stuffed up a 301 or if it really was an incorrectly implemented cloaked 301.
Story: Oh my God Dmoz is Gone!!!!
"What would happen if the Webmaster Tools perferences were set to "non-www" and the site then had the non-www to www redirect implemented a few months later, without changing the Webmaster Tools setting?"
Interesting question. I don't think cloaking 301's like this is standard practice so it'll be interesting to find out if this was indeed a googlebot bug or not....
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Story: We Apologise for our Hoax Story