Sites being heavily penalized by Google

It's just a theory, not that it gives it the thumb, but more ignores them, instead of penalizing sites for irrelevant/bad neighborhood outbounds.

It is an advertising tool afterall. Is it really too far fetched to suggest that google doesn't penalize people using the tool for it's stated purpose, but does penalize them for using it an seo tool?

 

Right, the site is recently moved, doesn't rank for any terms, but G sends it 5000 people a week, is that not called AdWords?

BTW, that fishing site, with every page supplemental and

Results 101 - 102 of about 200 for "www.fishing-forum.info".

Results 231 - 231 of about 1,100 linking to Sj1EMcGSVNIJ:www.fishing-forum.info/.

is it getting 5000 visitors a week from G too?

 

Nope, it's a regional site, a companion to our print publication, and our advertisers are gained the old fashioned way: They call us and offer to pay us money because our targeted, dedicated, local reader base shows a solid response rate.

 

I was just checking thru some of my sites, I have a bunch of sites with pr and 1000-85,000 pages indexed that have coop on them. I don't really care to share them because frankly there is nothing really in it for me.

I also have a bunch of sites that are banned that have no co-op , and just some link exchanges ... so maybe link exchanges get you banned too. I also have some sites that have recips , no co-op but have 3 way links banned too. So maybe google is banning 3 way links now too.

There are tons of people saying their sites are de-indexed who have NEVER used the co-op, so it appears that something limited to co-op users.

 

I really don't know what's really up with Google but I dropped off myself. A lot of myspace sites dropped that used the coop but myspacesupport.com who I refered to use the coop has not dropped at all and he still uses the coop network so could this be a new Google bug?

 

I have a site with no co-op or link exchanges that has been dropped off and I am simply putting it down to Google being ill.

 

If you take all the evidence, then I think it is pretty clear that there is some very strong form of alogrithmic change being applied to links in Big Daddy. This is certainly what you would expect as links have for the past year or so formed the main way for webmasters to manipulate the SERP's - it is only natural that google etal, will look to discount this sort of manipulation.

I have in previous posts tried to make a few suggestions as to what is happening.

I will summarise my thoughts below:

1/. The COOP is not a specific target for google - I do not believe it makes particular sense for them to target link networks on an individual basis as there must be thousands/millions - although COOP /link-vault are most in the public profile, there are many more and even interlinking sites that a webmaster own can be considered a link network on a much smaller scale - therefore it makes much more sense for google to use an alogrithm towards these links, as if new networks spring up then they are also targetted. This is in line with pretty much what google always does, rather than ban a single site (although they occasionally do this), they much prefer to change their alogrithm to ensure it penilises/rewards all sites that are doing the same thing.

2/. Google, with big daddy, is trying to level the playing field between sites which have manipulated their rankings up using links, with those sites that have not. This makes total sense, google hates being manipulated, and why if you had two identical sites should one rank significantly higher than the other just because it has tried to get more links pointing to it. In the eyes of the user both sites being identical are of equal use to a user, therefore as google want to produce the most relevant site to a user, then both sites should rank equal. Google therefore is trying to destinguish between sites on the basis of what they consider a natural link (one where another webmaster has link to a site because they like the site and where not solicited for the link ) and an artificial link ( link networks, purchased links, reciprocal links, three way links etc ).

3/. Google gives every page a document score. That score relates to everything on the page, including content and internal and external links.

4/. If a page is deemed by google to contain irrelevant/spammy links, then this can lead to a devaluation of the documents score.

5/. As document scores are passed from page to page within a site like PR, then if a site is judged to have spammy/irrelevant links on all its pages (which the COOP or other link networks may create), then as every page is devalued some document score, this is passed around the whole site, further devaluing all documents. If you take what Matt Cutts has said about sites "selling" links not being able to pass any benifit to pages they links to, then this has even further implications. If you consider that google may apply the same idea to pages serving network links (such as COOP), then if each page passes nothing on to every page it links to and that it may apply to internal pages as well, then you get to the senario where google see's a total site has nothing passed from one page to the next i.e HOMEPAGE passes nothing to subpage B, B passes nothing to C etc etc, then if a page is recieving no link vote at all, then this could expalin why some people are seeing their homepage show up (as we would assume the hompage should be getting some real link votes from external sites), but all their sub pages supplimental.

6/. The BIG DADDY update is new and with any new alogrithm, there are flaws. Therefore this may support the reports that some COOP sites have seen no falls, where as site not within link networks at all have seen falls. If this is the case then you can expect google to improve its alogrithm to catch the people it should have and not penilise the sites it should not.

7/. Everything works on a score basis, where you have numerous different types of score, such as document quality score and outgoing link quality score and incoming link score to make up an overall score for a document. Therefore, this would also explain why some sites are penilised in the COOP and others are not. If you have low scores across the board, then you are likely to get hit, but sites with just a low outgoing link score may not be penilised as heavily. - For example if the bbc.co.uk decided to put COOP ads on its site, then the result may be negligable as it scores so highly for all other things that the negative score for dubious out going links, has minimal impact. However, on ihavegotacrapsite.com then the COOP links may have a huge impact and google may drop it like a stone. Obviously there will be a wide spectrum of results and this would show why results are not the same across the board. Again I would point out that Big Daddy is a huge alogrithm update and there are always going to be errors, which I expect they will be working to improve.

 

Nice analysis, Big Richard.

But what is the point of dumping site ranks instead of simply removing the weight of the incoming links?

Try searching for 'bizreading', a site of mine that run co-op until last week.

http://www.google.com/search?q=bizreading&hl=en

You will find www.bizreading.com in the 10th position. What is the point? Is more useful Google this way?

I have lots of examples where a specific search for original and unique content (phrases that only appear in my site) lists before other sites scraping mine.

 

Hi Ferret. Your comments actually prompted me to do some checking as well. I still have a few sites at LV. What I thought I would check is the penalty that I have recieved...banned from serps, fully indexed, PR0 internal, home page maintains PR. This describes my situation pretty well. So I log into LV and check my oldest links (Oct 2005). My logic was the oldest links would likely have the highest PR. It was interesting to see that many (not all) of my ibls were coming from PR0 pages, while the index page had PR. Then I went further and checked quite a few internal pages of these sites only to discover all internals are flatline PR0. I don't want to post the URLs because the users may not appreciate me doing that. But I will say that any LV user can check that themselves with their account. I would be interested in learning what you find. Please no URLs just a general opinion.

I strongly agree with Big Richard. Those that can provide good argument that contradicts this are eventually going to have deal with it, IMO. No I am not being a shit here as I have spoken very highly in the past about DP COOP. I stopped using it because I thought (at the time) static was better. At the end of the day both networks are generally speaking the same tone right now. My personal belief is that bogus linking (the way Google sees it) is now being dealt with through an algo still being tweaked. I said it earlier in this thread and Big Richard has also said it. Link networks may not be in the cross hairs of Google's new algo BUT will naturally find them. You can see evidence of that with what Minstrel posted earlier in this thread. Matt tooting his own horn about link analysis software...in minutes if not seconds being able to determine the legetimacy of your ibls.

Any simple minded person would have to say the benefits of linking have, and will continue to change to accurately reflect what is natural. Along the way if Google sees fit to dole out a penalty for manipulation attempts there's really nothing you can do about it, other than not go there to begin with. It's a though decision particularly if you already have substantial weight or vaultage built up and you decide to kill it...losing that many links overnight becomes even more obvious what you were doing. You will probably be penalized for that as well, but (I hope) will eventually recover. In my case I decided to go for it and removed the site. The cost of this may be you lose your ability to pass reputation FOREVER


H

 

Interesting you should mention that I have got a couple of sites in LV and they are exactly the same (PR front page and 0 sub pages and supplimental). I had these sites in LV since June last year, and they where sites I bought just to get vaults - so no real concern. I also stopped adding links pointing to my main site last October, when there was a google update and I saw my site drop for no reason while others remained stable all around me - I assumed (I think correctly) that this was to do with the LV links pointing at me. Luckily approx 1 month after stopped adding the links pointing to my main site the rankings returned, so I count myself very lucky indeed.

Another interesting observation that rings true after your post is that I created a specific couple of pages on my site that is still in LV, that low keyword specific as a test. The pages ranked nowhere, and still don't - and this is a highly optimised page directly off a PR5 homepage. Given the above it seems that the homepage can no longer pass any credit to anything it links to - including internal links.

 

I really want to hear from more people on this, as well. I am hoping that people don't agree and can call me nuts . If many users honestly have the same opinion of the ibls pointing to them then we would be closer to some form of evidence. I realize that the DP and LV COOP claim to be entirely different, but they both claim and promote 'free advertising network'. In that regard they are similar. So the Google algo may be assuming that as well.

Here's something a little on the silly side, but it may illustrate what's also happening here. If I had a website called oranges.com and displayed information, images, alts, body content about apples. Likely google would not see any value in this site. If a network claims to be an advertising network yet allows users to place ads in the most inconspiciuos locations, tiny text, hidden text, no-follow tags, etc then that's not an orange it's an apple, IMO.


Cheers,


H

 

My sub pages keep their PR > 0.

 

Yeah, I'll have to agree with the notions in this last page or so, I'm almost co-op is negatively affecting rankings although I don't think this will occur across all sites and I don't think it's restricted to co-op as people have noted. It strikes me as a general related link issue and I'd guess that those the co-op is still working for are mostly running internet/web hosting/webmaster sites hence the links shown have remained relevant.

For me, they've not kicked me out but have kicked most pages into supplemental and have hit my homepage out of the rankings. For example I rank on the fifth page for a brandable name I invented (all the sites on the first 5 pages link to my site). On sites which aren't using the system and have unique content as with the deranked site, they're ranking fine at least for their main invented brandable keyword. I'm pretty sure we can rule out serverwide kills for it but I'm almost certain there is a huge devaluation on a site-by-site basis.

I was a huge fan of the co-op when it started and it gave me loads of traffic but I think Google has really stepped up the mark (along with msn here it seems for me), for me at least the co-op doesn't work and I've removed the ads.

 

If anyone's up for selling their site now that they're not listed in google anymore, send me a PM. No site too big/small.

 

One of my sites that was deindexed as many of ours from the 1.5M indexed pages to 600 with loosing SERP possitions was restored on one of the G datacenter to 128K indexed pages. Could you check yours?

PS I hope it's a good sign.

 

Same problem here.
Two of my websites are no more receiving visits from Google, and one of them was removed from index.

I removed the script.

 

You were running co-op ads?

 

I was just about to say. That site is still #1 in google and he uses Coop.

 

Yesterday I found a site of mine that had never run co-op reached by the same kind of penalty (I find the site in the second page searching for the domain without the .com and scrappers appear before it in SERPs for unique content).

Definitively, now I think there is no direct connection between penalties and the co-op.

 

I don't think anybody is suggesting that using the co-op equals auto penalty or that not using it equals plain sailing. However, if a lot of your links are irrelevant, I'm almost certain you'll get penalised and that's where the problem lies, the relevancy of the coop. Some sites come out alright but at the same time, a lot end up penalised.