I've written a fair amount about Google Bowling which is setting up external links to clobber a competitor. While I've read about this, I wondered how "real" it was ... but now believe it is based on my experience. I welcome thoughts/feedback on my analysis, along with other war stories from DP'ers about Google Bowling - both folks who have been affected ... and maybe those that have actually done it! ;-) Note that in my writeup I suggest/conclude that this negative penalty is actually a good thing for overall search relevance, but as with anything, has unintended consequences as it can be used as a weapon by nefarious folks.
Excellent article. Hope I knew these secret technics so I can push away these 80 competitors that dare to be ahead of me
I am trying to get my little mind around this. I just read through everything you posted regarding your contest page being Google Bowled. I was under the impression (correct me, please) that a proper Google Bowling would eliminate you from the index, not just push you lower in results. On the other hand, if this is a proper GB event, is it possible that the popularity of your page was a self-inflicted Google Bowling? This begs the question of filters that Google has set for number new links seen in a certain number of days. But when I see those stories, it usually is a de-indexing, not just reduced ranking. In looking at the contest results, it is interesting to note that many of the competitors are entire websites, not just one web page. Could that have an effect on the over all SERPs? I am SEO dumb, so I am just looking at this analytically.
There is no real difference between being unindexed and reduced. If you are penalized and pushed back to page 78, people won't find you anyway. I don't think you can be unindexed just because of backlinks. Your website must infringe the rules for that (typicaly cloaking).
Well my best wishes with you that you do good... I think that if you do some reciprocals.. that might help..
Most of the links in this contest will be unnatural so it would seem strange for this one site to have been penalized I suggest that it will sort itself out. Hopefully.
Personally, i'm not convinced that google bowling exists. Purely because there is no way of really controlling who links to you. If google bowling was infact operational and in existance, there would be a hell of a lot of chatter in all the seo forums and an influx of calls into Google support. If you think about it, any new trend (IPOD or whatever) would suffer from google bowling as sites talking about the new trend would get a mass amount of links in a small period of time. Alek,personally I think there may have been a filter triggered, it is unnatural for sites to get an enormous amount of high PR links and very little low PR links in a short period of time unless you are buying them. I know you are NOT buying your links but your site is probably being considered in the general rule and not the exception to the rule. I would recommend that you try to increase your low PR links. Also you may want to increase your outbound links to quality sites, but again a nice mix of high and low PR sites. Mix it up , make it look natural! my 2 cents Frank
But, isn't this in fact a Google Bowling? If there is a filter that has been triggered and someone knows how to trigger it on your site by doing something (pointing links, etc), that would suggest GB exists. On the other hand, I think I agree more with what you are saying and Alek's page was an unintended victim of its own success.
Phynder, I understand where you are coming from with your comment. I tend to differentiate GB from the BL trigger, although they overlap and I know, its kinda the same thing but it is not. At least not in my mind. With "GB" it is implied malicious use, the BL trigger implies greedy webmasters. Its common speculation that an increase of BLs in an unnatural way can cause some sort of penalty ... this has been discussed for well over a year. GB discussions, has only come to the forefront in the last 6-8 months (I may be wrong). If GB were a reality, you would see more garbage on the G index as good sites would drop from the index, G's PR tool would be significantly poluted because of the GB effect, and DP CO-OP registrations would be through the roof. Alek, you may want to ask Matt about this through his blog! just some thoughts Frank
I agree, as I stated in a previous post somewhere or email. PR is not going to win this contest. High SERPs goes beyond having high PR, it a accumulation of many aspects of SEO. It is evident by looking at who's leading the contest, its not the highest PR page and its not the page with the highest number of links. Its much more than that!
While I agree with that lingo, my guess is the underlying algorithms used by Google are the same ... since both the GB and BL-trigger signatures are identical - i.e. how does the SE know if it is YOU generating tons of back links or if your competitor is?!? ;-) I'd love to ask Matt Cutts or someone from Google ... but realistically, my chance of any type of response is about 0.0001% Good suggestion guys - I'm mulling over all the advice and trying to think how to best communicate this out to the folks that are helping me out. In the meantime, I pulled a bunch of nofollows (except for the recip links) from the main contest page per some suggestions above.
Two cents appreciated - keep it coming Frank and others. Yes, no bought links - in fact, I haven't spent a dime out of my pocket on this thing, although certainly a wheee bit of time. There are TONS of low PR inbounds (not just site-wides), so I think there actually is a good mix of low/high PR. But my guess is not only the sheer number of links, but that they are predominantly anchor-texted V-E is what is tripping the GoogleBowl/BackLink filter. The fact that the page continues to rank very high in both MSN and Yahoo indicates this is Google specific to me.
Alek, You should but a blog/comment display on the bottom of that page. It would be interesting to see what other's have to say. -jay
Not easy for me to add that, but I just added a highlight near the top about ongoing forum discussion here.
Not sure if anybody is pointing coop weight at the site but you could try some different anchor text on some of the links. Having so many V-E anchor rich links must be near to tripping a filter somewhere.
Hello Alek. I currently have a sitewide on one of my sites pointing to your v7ndotcom page. Would it be helpful to change the anchor text? While I am only contributing 40 or 50 backlinks, if it helps alleviate your googlebowled situation even a little bit, it may be worth it. Let me know if you would like it changed, and what you would like the link anchor text changed to!
At an attempt at being funny (and also changing the anchor text), how 'bout changing it (and your DP signature) to "Help this GoogleBowled Website" - heh, heh! ;-) Thanx Caydel