Links, Bad Neighborhoods, and penalities.

johnweb Peon

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#1

I haven't been around long enough to put in a link in the post, but on the sitemaps group (http://groups.google.com/group/google-sitemaps) Google Employee (Perhaps Venessa Fox) had an interesting response to a question today.

The form is a way to ask us to manually review a site to see if it
abides by the guidelines, which is something we only do for sites that
have been removed from the index for guidelines violations.

If a site disappears from the index for any other reason, reincluson of
that site is handled by our algorithms. We are always refreshing our
index, so fluctuations always occur. If the site is missing entirely,
the most common things to check are:

-The summary page of Sitemaps. Is there a message that Googlebot can't
access your home page? Believe it or not, we've found this to be a
common reasons that sites drop out of the index. Something happens with
the site or server that prevents Googlebot from accessing it.

-The web crawl errors in Sitemaps. This is the same basic idea as
above, only at a more granular level.

-Is your site easily crawlable? As webado mentioned, how does your site
look in a text browser? Can you still navigate the links?

-Is your site well-linked from other sites? Do other sites link to
yours and is this natural linking? (If the link structure violates our
guidelines -- for instance, link schemes and bad neighborhoods -- they
won't be counted.)

-Are your pages unique? Is there reason for us to index all of them or
is the content duplicate to other pages on your site or on other sites?
Click to expand...

For me the most interesting thing is regarding the links. She doesn't say anything about bannation, penalty, deindexing, supplementhell, just "won't be counted"

This is the most precise information I've seen from them on links. Matt Cutts will say something like "...take a look at how you link..." but not what that specifically means.

I still say there's no such thing as a bad link. There may be bad linking behavior, like having your MFA site get 1800 blog and guestbook posts in one night, but the actual links aren't the problem.

Long live directories.

johnweb, Jul 13, 2006 IP

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Nonny Notable Member

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#2

Microsoft has a tool called "Strider Search Defender" that identifies sites that are advertised via spam to message boards, blog comments and guest books. Other sites that are also linked to are considered to also be suspect "spam", so it seems like there could be guilt by association if you are linked to by a site that also links to "spam" sites*

1. Starting with a seed list of confirmed spam URLs, the Spam Hunter supplies them as search terms (or â€œlink:â€ query terms) to search engines to locate the forums and guest books at which they were spammed, gathers additional URLs from each of these pages to grow the list, and does this iteratively until the list â€œconvergesâ€, i.e., the list no longer grows significantly after a query iteration.

The list automatically generated from the above step is only a list of â€œpotentialâ€ spam URLs because there can be false positives. For example, some spammed forum pages may contain earlier comments from actual users that include non-spam URLs; spammers may intentionally intersperse non-spam URLs with spam ones.

2. To filter out false positives, we feed the list of potential spam URLs to the Strider URL Tracer [. . .]. The tracer provides a key functionality called the Top Domain view: given a list of (primary) URLs, the tracer launches an actual browser to visit each URL and records all secondary URLs visited as a result. At the end of the batched scan, the Top Domain view provides the list of third-party domains that received secondary-URL traffic and rank them by the number of primary URLs that generated traffic to them. If the input is a list of potential spam URLs, the Top Domain view essentially highlights those target-page domains that are associated with a large number of doorway-page URLs. To further reduce false positives, we use the whitelist of legitimate ads syndicators and web-analytics servers that were heavy redirection-traffic receivers in our Strider HoneyMonkey scan of the top one million click-through URLs [6,7]. The ranked Top Domain list is then used to prioritize manual investigation. Once a third-party domain is determined to be a spammerâ€™s domain, all doorway-page URLs associated with that domain are labeled as high-potential spam URLs.
Click to expand...

http://research.microsoft.com/SearchDefender/
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/?p=286

* It's not clear whether this is theoretical, or if MSN search actually uses the SearchDefender algorithms.

Nonny, Jul 15, 2006 IP

Christine8 Peon

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#3

After the BidDaddy update Matt posted a comment that suggest that links from an to bad neighborhoods will get your site banned. I have personally worked on a site that was banned and I am pretty sure it was because of the links. After I reomved those and submitted a re-inclusion request the site showed up again.

Christine8, Jul 15, 2006 IP

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Links, Bad Neighborhoods, and penalities.

johnweb Peon

Nonny Notable Member

Christine8 Peon

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