Did Google just Admit your competitor can get you Penalized !!!!

Like alot fo other people, my site was de-indexed on Dec-10 and then re-indexed 3 days later with a -50 Peanalty and does not rank first even for the company name.

After talking to alot of people in this forum and others and reading alot of speculations, I found a thread on Google Webmaster Help. Another person has the same problem and didn't think one way incoming links can bring you down.....since anybody can get those for you....EVEN YOUR COMPETITOR.

BUT a Google employee responded with the following:

"A quick look at the sites shows that they are technically of pretty high quality. So let's take a look at the other part, how people link to your site (I'm just looking at www.yoursite.com to keep it simple). A sample of the links that we know about can be found by searching for link:site.com ..... Looking at the first sites listed gets me slightly worried... "first-site", "second-site" and "third-site" do not sound like the average sites that would link to a website about "yoursite". The first site links to your site in the blogroll along with the likes of "Car Rental Software" and "Download Youtube Videos". That strikes me kind of odd for a your type of site. The second-site lists you under "Partners", as does the third-site. it does strike me kind of odd that these unrelated sites would all link to your-site in such a way. The quality of these links appears very low and they look pretty artificial to me. How do you suppose they got there? .....We would love to present more of your sites to visitors in our search results, but before we do that, we need to know that we can trust you, the sites and the links pointing to them. Once you feel that everything is trustworthy and complies with our webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 , feel free to file a reconsideration request and let us know about it."

OK this was what I was afraid of, I really thought Google had something in place so other people can't get you penalized for things that are not in your control. So anybody can buy me links in crappy sites and thats it, I get penalized ??? and NO the answer can't be "nobody would really do that"

Anyways.. Read this thread and let me know what you guys think !!!

http://groups.google.com/group/Goog...f77a59/37e9e2aded17eef1?lnk=gst&q=competitor#

Note: If the poster has a G logo next to their username, he/she is a Google employee.

 

A lot of people don't accept it yet, but yes I believe google are, in some circumstances, penalising sites for buying links (including recent deindexings).

 

I agree, and it also seems that the Google employee JohnMu hints at some backlinks not counting and affecting serps in this paragraph...

If PageRank is a result of backlinks and backlinks can affect your serps... does that mean PR now does affect your serps?

Cheers
James

 

Same thing happened with my website, The person who reported my site is also a DP member.

 

this is so illogical. Why wouldn't google just not count the links? That is such a bad policy on their part to penalize a site because of a few links.

 

"KunkVentures" .. I hear you. But what can really do !!!

I still kinda can't believe any of it. The logic just doesn't register with me. Doesn't it bring whole concept crashing down !!

OR since it doen't affect the majority, it doesnt really matter. Most people dont have sites, they are just users, so it wont make any differnce overall...even if its a flaw in google.

But I am still screwed..aint I

 

Well...this has opened up a whole can of worms and giving ideas to the masters of the underworld in Black Hat SEO. So much for genuine White Hat techniques huh?

 

I myself bought a couple of links in the last 3 months and indeed my indexed pages number lowered.
Also, my adsense earnings got up to 40% lower than "normal".

 

Yep
I may spend Xmas trawling cometitor sites and buying links for them, and leave the ones alone who are dearer

 

Who was this? A professor?

 

It's a slippery slope if Google wants to penalize for links that appear paid/artifical.

Yesterday, someone submitted a link at my directory with a reciprocal. They are a directory as well so its passes the relevancy test. However, they placed the recip under an "our friends" category which displays on every page of their directory. Was this a paid link? No. Does this mean I should reconsider even having reciprocal links? Yes.

The Web is built on sites linking to each other. If you were a search engine company and scared the sh*t out of webmasters linking to each other, might this drive up search volume for your company? Let's face it, if you want to dominate the search industry simply crush the will of webmasters to link to other sites. Over time search volume would surely rise if the foundation of linking to other sites was destroyed.

 

From Spencers Blog interview with Matt Cutts:

 

Of course, he would say that...but yes, I think he is completely right in saying:

It would be madness to go and spend $1000 to try and take out a competitor.

But it is a bit annoying to see my own results drop, as they have since I stopped actively buying and selling links, when I know full well that the sites now above me all have very substantial link buying / link exchange / interlinking programmes in place.

 

Previously Matt Cutts stated that Google's algo can detect most paid links. So there is no need to report a site for link buying, etc... Therefore, the sabatoger can remain anonymous.

One only needs to look at sites that have been penalized to get an idea of where to purchase/post links in a sabatoge effort. I can think of a few places without even giving it much thought.

Like I said before, this is a slippery slope. If Google starts penalizing sites for a bad link or two, offpage SEO will eventually include taking out the competition. Devalue bogus links yes, but to penalize a site for bad links will open a can of worms.

Anyway, take a look at Google's serps now. I think they took a few steps backwards. Lot's of irrelevant sites showing in top ten.

 

I know plenty of web sites that would gladly spend $1000 to drop a competitor 50-100 spots in Google. In some of the industries that I work with, dropping from the top 3 in Google, to the 2nd or 3rd page could mean a drop in annual revenue of about $50,000-$100,000.

 

Not really. For competitive keywords/phrases one could easily make a nice return on such an investment. And who really knows how long it would take for the competitor to come back to their original postion. If it would take a month or longer, this could be extremely profitable.

Since most webmasters are actively building links, what's the difference if they used that time to sabotage their competitors sites? Or let's make this even more interesting... Let's use a model like three way link exchanges. Site A buys links on Site B for Competitor 1. Site C reports the paid links to Google thus hiding Site A's involvement in the scheme. Therefore, you probably don't need to spend anything near $1000 to hurt a competitors ranking.

 

"A lot of people don't accept it yet, but yes I believe google are, in some circumstances, penalising sites for buying links (including recent deindexings)."

Rsputin there is nothing to believe or accept. Google clearly states that buying links is wrong. You can even report sites u think are buying links.

Overall story is quite shocking.


Regards,
ASHISH T.

 

Yep, I know, the main phrase I have fallen for will cost me more than that! But you have to factor in that there are probably several competitors, and the strategy might not work anyway...

But you're right, there will be ways around spending so much, and the more the 'penalty process' changes from a manual procedure to an automated one the easier it will be.

 

If this is correct it is stupid. If google penalizes people for what appears on other third party sites, paid or not paid, then it opens the door to Google Bowl away your competition and then the Google index is going to go to junk. As an aside why bother with your business start a new business knocking your competitors out of the index or do it for others and get paid well. Just find out the sites google doesn't like and get links posted there. better yet start your own sites that google hates and post links to the comeptitors of your clients.
I am thinking we are missing something here or google made an error they will quickly correct. Google hates anyone making money off of them and this would open up a whole new cottage industry - Google Bowling.

 

My point is this. One could compare backlinks for multiple sites that have lost their rankings in the serps. Find what they have in common and you can determine the "bad neighborhoods."

My site that lost rankings maybe has two questionable links at most, neither of which are paid. So if this were indeed a penalty, I know exactly which links are responsible. In less competitive niches, one would not even have to spend any money to take out their competition.

Anyway, I'm not saying our loss in the serps is a penalty. There is a lot of irrelevant listings showing up, and hopefully Google will work them out. In Google's Webmaster Blog, they noted on 12/18/07 that the supplemental index is no more. When people search, they will search all of Google's listings. I would suggest posting your legitimate complaints there. If nothing else, someone from Google will be forced to delete your comment as they did mine.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/ultimate-fate-of-supplemental-results.html