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

I completely agree with your statement about irrelevant/broken/under construction links showing up lately in Google ahead of relevant links. If they are really being as fanatical as it appears they are being, they are hurting the quality of their own SERPs, all in an effort to punish some sites they are singling out (rightly or wrongly) as having bought links, or having links on sites with unrelated content, etc.

They are throwing the baby out with the bathwater and opening up a huge door to corporate espionage. For one thing, their bottom line goal should be to have a site show up in the SERPS where it belongs period. This concept of de-indexing or giving a -50 penalty for a perceived SEO sin is absurd. For one thing, their perception may be wrong, and for another, the penalized page is showing up in the wrong place and they are doing a disservice to the person searching by giving skewed results. This is crazy

Makes you wonder if google hasn't gotten a little too big for their britches, so to speak. Maybe this sort of nonsense will end up helping Google's competitors and break their stranglehold on web searching. I have never been a big fan of monopolies anyway.

 

unless your budget was hundreds or thousands of times that amount, then it would be quite reasonable to do this to all competitors that were in front of you, and target low quality sites accross the web...

 

They still don't have means to identify each and every paid links, so they need to threaten webmasters.

 

Well, this is certainly interesting. Congratulations Google on screwing over anyone that uses white hat SEO techniques from now on

 

The login to penalize sites that way is illogical.

Take for example my site that has one way 730+ links. Site owners have linked to my site and almost all of them 99.99% are related to the category of my site. Page rank of this site is 5. However in serps, my website is at #3. #1 and #2 are occupied by sites whose domains names closely match with that of the words in search terms. One is a blogsport blog and the other is a wordpress blog hosted on its own domain. Their Page ranks are 3,4 respectively.

I don't know, why my website doesn't move to #1 spot.

Now, iam concerned that down the lane google may penalize my site too as almost all of the links pointing to my site are in Blog Roll and very few in Partner sections.

Can anyone explain?

 

I'm sure this has already happened to me. (A competitor taking out my ranking.)

One of my sites has been #1 in google for it's keyword for a couple years and then suddenly fell to page 5 a few months back.
The domain also happens to be the keyword so this is just way to unlikely to be unintentional.

All I can do is wait it out and hope it changes back soon.. I've lost several hundred already.

 

Thank you so much, I was going to buy lots of unrelated links until i read this

 

Yup, I agree. Black Hat SEOers will soon takeover all of the white hat seoers.

 

I noticed the same. It seems greater relevancy is given to the domain or URL and less relevancy to the actual content on the page. Regardless, I still rank 18 or so for my business name which is exactly the same as the domain. Two parked domains are above mine for a search for my exact company name.

 

That is weird. Google's algorithm seems drunk.

 

Stephan Spencer: Great.

How concerned are you over the tactic of aggressive link buying to competitors’ sites in order to take down competitors? How long, do you think, it will be until competitors start taking each others’ sites out in Google with aggressive link buying?

Matt Cutts: I do not think a smart competitor will even try that second one because they would be more likely to help. The thing is, we are very aware that site ‘A’ could buy links to site ‘B’, and then spam-report site ‘B’ and try to frame site ‘B’. So we try very hard, in all of our spam techniques, to make it so that one site can not sabotage another site.


"Gford" .. I see that Matt Cutts is trying to assure the webmasters that its not easy for someone to get your site penalized...BUT that doen't satisfy anybody. It should be that NO ONE can get you penalized in anyway....OR else the logic is flawed period.

In that quote from Matt Cutts....his reponse is basically that no smart competitor will really do that, but if they do !!!! THEN WHAT.

The answer should be "NO the competitor will not be able to harm your site"....not something like "So we try very hard, in all of our spam techniques, to make it so that one site can not sabotage another site."

THEY TRY !!! after all these guidlines you make me follow....

 

If it is that difficult for someone to take down a competitors site, then why is it so easy for us to hurt our rankings with bad link building methods? Let me guess, Google now employs psychics. lol

Think about it for a moment. How many people have you heard say that they only bought a few links and their site was penalized?

There is nothing positive about this or Google's recent algo change. Well, I take that back. Google's relevancy atleast for my niche has gone down the tubes. Maybe more people will give Yahoo a try for better results.

 

Good post.

If parked domains can rank higher for your company name which obviously was created and submitted earlier, I would also be confused about this Google cleanup.

 

oh, but it is just a discount of the links. They are discounting them. So, if you didn't put them there, then don't worry about them not "counting" for anything

 

I am not sure if this guy is really Google employee .. any how I believe that inbound links can hurt your ranking .. many people will say your competitor can harm your ranking and I will tell you what is the bet of Google in this case:
They bet that you can afford paying money/spending time on that .. especially that there is no guarantee that you can harm your competitors ranking .. going farther you might end up boosting his ranking.

So simply if you have the budget/time .. give it a shot .. you can really put your competitors down especially if their website doesn’t have enough authority ... in this case killing his ranking will be almost guaranteed

 

how did i get de indexed? i only had 1 page indexed and i just bought the domain a few weeks ago..

this is insane.

 

You're right. I get less traffic from Yahoo at the moment, but the traffic I get is from keywords that are a lot more closely related to my site than the Google keywords are... I get traffic from Google for keywords like "make money on IMVU" "Hustler layouts" "College students make money," etc. I don't have posts about any of those things.. At the same time, I don't show up in the search results for things like "how to start an online university" which is exactly the name of one of my posts, and there are no other posts like it in their search results (all of them are about enrolling in online universities.. it makes no sense!)

This doesn't happen with Yahoo at all.

 

we should try and test it. Every just add a link from one of your sites with the words "paid sponsor" next to it and link it too a "chicken wings" search result #4 (buffalowings . com) and see if it goes down in a few days.
What do ya say?

 

It's a pitty text link brokerages are going to transform to "competitor killing machines" because of Matt Cutts' hate for paid links.

 

Ha ha, paid link sellers will make more money for being in a bad neighborhood than if they had a good PR!! The bottom feeders will rule the net!