Campaign to abolish secret search engine penalties mentioned by the Financial Times

Can you imagine the headache this would actually cause companies like Google? So, they tell you why you are penalised and then you demand to know why. They tell you why and then you demand to know why they are picking on you and why haven't sites x,y and z been penalised for doing the same thing.

There are reasons why some of these finance-related companies get penalised. Many of them buy links like nobody's business. If you have a site with good PR and rankings, you may have been approached by one of their agents offering big bucks for a link. It's difficult to stay under the radar when you are spending insane amounts of cash to rank for keywords like "insurance".

At the end of the day, each webmaster knows the rules of the game. If you stick to the rules it is extremely unlikely that you will penalised. Most of us break the rules, some bend the rules more than others and stand a higher chance of being busted. But those are the risks we take. It's never going to be fair because some will break the rules and get away with it while others get penalised. That's just the way things are.

 

Just briefly to put things back in perspective.
We are not looking for search engines to reveal reasons for any ranking change or penalty. Penalties are a good thing in most cases as they filter out spam and bad sites.
However, sometimes they do get imposed apparently by mistake and it should be fair for webmasters to be able to confirm whether that is the case. Fact is that most of the traffic of any website comes to a great proportion from search engines, and in particular from the market leader which is Google (90%+ in Europe).
Online businesses are exposed to a significant risk as a result - and a bit more transparency would help.
The objective of our campaign is really focused on the most basic transparency step - for website owners to be able to confirm the penalty status (yes/no) with any leading search engine.
I would image all website owners should welcome this.

 

That would be a trustworthy goal, if search engines were not biased. Here is part of what will happen :

• You volunteer your IP address, and location in the world
• Admit you are the owner of the site
• Become tracked around the majority of the web, thanks to analytics

Just that small bit of information builds a "presence" online that search engines are well aware of. Are you willing to give them even more control over your online life ?


Having a mediator between the "problem" search engine and the webmaster who wonders if they are penalized is superior to dealing directly with the search engine. Then again, your mediator can not be biased. The good news is that the mediator is not so likely to know your every search term, location or track you in your travels on the web.


Creating software to do the above may not work since some search engines do not allow automated requests.