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

Dear all,

I thought I'd draw your attention that our campaign to get search engines to confirm whether a penalty has been imposed on a website's rankings has been mentioned by the Financial Times here.

Our campaign is really targeted at all major search engines, and calls for more transparency surrounding crippling search penalties. We expect further media coverage as we launch the campaign over the coming days. Any website owners concerned about penalties should support us by submitting a case study here.

Any comments are welcome, any specific questions please pm me.

Many thanks
Marc

 

Good luck with that....seems pretty futile

 

if the SEO process is not transparent, if the website promotion is not transparent, how can you expect search engines more transparent?

 

Truthfully, Google or any other SE doesn't owe you or me anything. It is a private company that offers a service, period. If you don't want to worry about being penalized, follow the one rule that they all live by "don't attempt to manipulate their search engine ranking algorithm."

Why would any SE reveal why a site is penalized? Every spammer under the sun would then know exactly what works and what doesn't. So, SERPs would be loaded with more crap than they already are. IMO, rather than cry and whine, people should just build a quality website.

 

longcall911: Quality websites which adhere to white hat SEO practises and the Google Webmaster guidelines do get penalized. There are numerous examples. Also, the role of a leading search engine which dominates the online marketplace (80% or so in the case of Google) bears responsibilities which ought to be taken seriously. The FAQ section on our site provides further background information.

We are now widening the public launch of our campaign to abolish secret search penalties. See the press release here - this is being circulated to the media as we speak. If you are a website owner concerned about penalties please join our campaign and help us build a voice by submitting your case study here.

 

While I understand your frustration, I think longcall911 pretty much hit the nail on the head.

Globally, its a lot less than 80% (But why let facts get in the way of an agenda), and yes, Google do have a responsibility... A responsibility to the owners, staff, investors and shareholders to maintain their market share. To do that they need to protect their ranking secrets from falling into the hands of their competitors and spammers.

I think your confusing 'ranking' with 'penalty'. and I'm sure someone like Microsoft would love to know Google's ranking secrets (Maybe that's why their funding your campaign?).
The moment you aligned yourself with Google's biggest competitor, you lost all credibility. IMHO

Cheers
James

 

I have read it. This is a problem between major companies and webmaster but not with regular users. It won't effect on Google reputation and Microsoft cannot just sit behind the scene while bashing on Google and hope it would succeed, and surely Microsoft already know about this.

I think they were intend to get some attention but nothing else. Google algorithm is their own assets and they can do whatever they wanted with the results. How complains from webmaster could change anything? or break down Google reputation for regular users? I have seen nothing ever close into it.

Most regular users will keep using Google as long as they think Google can brought them whatever they wanted, and thus many webmasters (not all) are still relying on Google.

 

Now this is very very interesting.

Longcall911 have a point when he mention that SE are private owned companies providing a free service and that as so they arent really obliged to reveal their algorithm or what/why they take in consideration when reviewing sites, because after all SERP's should be the most pure and real possible, and not totally manipulated by massive SEO campaigns (yeah hate me now )

But on other side when the service that the companies in question provide are one of "information provider" (directly or indirectly) and one of the companies in questions owns 75%+ of the entire market share then i believe we, internet users (webmasters or not) should have the right to know better how does that company work and what parameters they follow when delivering their service, after all is a lot of power they have, when they can control what information 75%+ of the people will see first or last.

 

I highly doubt it will be successful
Search engines never release much of their algorithms to avoid SEO black hats from developing ways around the SE algorithm

Although I would love to know when I become banned or penalized, just few days ago my SERP decreased by 2 poitions, and I was becoming crazy if it was a penalty, or if I had done something wrong

 

Would you be so kind as to post 6 - 10 of these numerous examples here.

 

No problem - here are 12 examples that come to mind.

www.onenewspage.com (which is my company) - suffered a 9-month penalty leading to 95%+ loss of Google traffic, see newspaper article (The Telegraph, UK) here

Media corp (a number of owned websites) - media coverage

Foundem (foundem.co.uk), Ciao, and ejustice.fr - anti-trust complaint against Google in Brussels resulting from search penalties - media coverage here

BMW - although the background to this penalty may be a breach of Google's webmaster guidelines.. media coverage here

MoneySupermarket.com, Confused.com, GoCompare.com, SourceTool.com - all mentioned here

TradeComet - a case study on our site here

StadtPlanDienst.de - another case study on our site here


Overall, all we are asking for is for the leading search engines which at the end of the day are the gate keepers of most visitor traffic for most online sites to disclose upon request to the site owner whether the site has been penalised. That's fair, isn't it?

Many thanks
Marc

 

Big brands are almost completely immune to any penalties, the playing field is not level and Gooogle also has a vested interest in having webmasters spend their advertising dollars on adwords instead of buying ads from others. I see major anti-trust issues in Gooogles future.

 

May be a breach?
They were busted for cloaking in 2006 and got what they deserved. plain and simple.

What sort of disclosure do you hope for?... A simple yes/no answer? or do you expect a list of things you've been caught doing wrong?
There's a very good reason why their so vague about ranking factors, and I'm sure you understand why.

In the same way a boost in ranking doesn't mean a penalty has been lifted, a drop in ranking doesn't mean a penalty has been applied.
If you expect Google to reply to every webmaster who wants to know why their sites rankings have changed, then good luck to ya, because your going to need it.

Cheers
James

 

LOL
What's next on the agenda? The ingredients of Kentucky Fried Chicken's secret recipe? I mean, we should know what we are eating, shouldn't we?

 

For me, your question "that's fair isn't it?" is the crux of the issue. I hear 5 year olds cry and whine 'that's not fair Mommy' and it makes my skin crawl. Alert: life is not fair. Alert: business is not fair. And, no one owes you fairness.

It seems that you want government to legislate fairness. Surely, Google and many others don't agree with your definition of fair. What would you even do if you were told that you had a penalty? You would then push for legislation to disclose *why* you are penalized. That would open the door to spammers and that is not fair to me then (if you want to play the fairness game).

If you did nothing wrong, my heart goes out to you. But you know what, I've been screwed dozens of times in business by competitors, friends, and employees. Yet, I don't let it bother me. I put it behind me, remain an honest businessman, and move on (after I kick myself for being too trusting).

The biggest lesson in your story is that if you rely primarily on Google for your traffic you take a huge risk. One day rankings are here. One day they are gone. Your business plan is flawed. You are now forced to diversify your revenue stream, and that is a good thing for your long term success. Best of luck to you. I do sincerely hope that your business recovers.

 

The search engines won't budge. And in many was with such transparency, the internet might be a worse place.
Also, in many ways, the secrecy of the intricacies of the search engine algorithms are key to a SE company.

 

Looking at the sites mentioned in the link above, I see what I expected: garbage sites with no original content and no product or services to sell. ALL of them should be ignored and thrown in the trash heap as Google has rightly done. Apparently the OP wants to organize all the garbage sites and form some sort of union to protect themselves from authentic, legitimate business. What we really need is something to protect us from him and these garbage sites.

Oh! We do! It's Google!

 

WOW. That is a big goal. All the major ones ? One person said it succinctly here, they really do not owe webmasters anything. Their main goal is to provide relevant content to their searchers. If you feel you have been treated unfairly by them, the best alternative would be to replace them. Start your own search engine.


Using social marketing ( twitter, facebook, reddit, etc ) would be an alternative to trying to mold the search engines to your will. Please keep us posted on your progress with this project.

 

Stop winging and do something! Why don't you build your own search engine and then you can try and stop hundreds of thousands of people trying to spam and game your search engine every day. And then if you do happen to make a mistake, and accidentally penalize someone you shouldn't have, you can create your own transparent process (which will just let all the spammers know exactly how to game your system).

When you've built something worthwhile that has contributed to society, then you can comment and criticise. What have you shipped?

 

This is one of the best ideas in the thread (IMO).