Google's 950 Penalty

[Bill]

Originally Posted by spacemanspiff

If every LL webmaster had changed his anchor text recip page after every trade, would we be seeing a whole lot of link lists in the 950 graveyard?

I'm not sure I've understand what you mean by this - "changed his anchor text recip page after every trade" - could you explain this a bit more.

If my current theory is correct, one thing every link list owner _could_ do, that might help, is edit and rewrite the anchor texts for trades on their index and other pages, so that instead of everyone trying to "overoptimize" for specific keywords and texts (usually the name of their domain, or something similar), the links would start to become more unique and natural looking.

The obsession with getting everyone to use the same anchor texts, which DID work 3 years ago, is now coming back to haunt us, I suspect.

Unique and changing anchor texts are now the way to go, imo.

[Bill]

I also think the pattern of everyone clustering their "google" link exchanges at the bottom of pages is a danger - as I understand it, we know based on certain recent patents (tho the details of which patent have slipped my memory) that google has ways of breaking a page up into areas, in order to seperate out the "content" from headers, footers, and so on.

I personally suspect that links at the bottom of the page, that are not navigation links to pages within the domain, are now raising a flag.

It's a fairly easily detectable form of "overoptimization".

[Halfdeck]

If you are being penalized, could a reinclusion request really hurt? I was told that if you are listed at all, you don't really want to bring attention to yourself.

Jim, no one can guarantee that a reinclusion request won't harm you. At the very least, if you request one without cleaning up your act, its not going to help. And I can understand how some people can be overly suspicious of Google's handling of adult sites. When someone manually reviews your site, the outcome sometimes depends on irrational Googlers with pre-conceived biases. Some Googlers just don't like porn; that's a fact we have to live with.

But that back-alley mentality has to die. Remember, what... 25%(?) of all searches on Google are porn related. Google needs porn sites as much as we need Google. What would happen if Google stopped displaying porn results? They'll lose a huge chunk of their traffic to Yahoo/MSN.

Google will flag you so that you can not show up well for "amateur sex" but for "sex amateur" you're fine, or something such.

That's in line with how Google deals with Google bombs, where, for example, colbertnation.com was deranked for "greatest living american" but still ranks first for "living greatest american", "american greatest living", etc.

However, I felt one couldn't be certain that the "penalty" referred to in that part of what cutts said to be directly tied to the so-called 950.

Bill, it really doesn't matter what penalties are involved. If you're penalized, whether its the -30 penalty, the -111 penalty, or the 950 penalty, you're likely not going to get off the hook by just de-optimizing a site.

This is radically different from what adult sites do.

The point here is this:

- 90% of all outbound links on adult sites are non-editorial.
- anchor text on recips are too targeted. Anchor text like "click here" looks more legit than anchor text that targets big money terms like "free porn."
- tens of thousands of recips pointing to a category page with identical anchor text screams "I really, really, really wanna rank high for 'amateur porn'" aka search results manipulation
- a high number of reciprocated links underline the fact that the links are non-editorial.
- 90% of outbounds are non-contextual sidebar/bottom-of-the-page/top-of-the-page links. When links point to an external site and they aren't embedded in a paragraph, that's a big tip off and its easy as hell to detect.

Look, Google doesn't sit still. What worked last year isn't necessary going to work this year or the next year. This year, Google declared a war against link manipulation. You can work against the grain or find the path of least resistence.

It's not just a race about who gets the most free site submits/backlinks/day anymore. Whoever figures out how to adjust to the post-Big Daddy Google will have a leg up on the competition.

[Bill]

halfdeck said---Bill, it really doesn't matter what penalties are involved. If you're penalized, whether its the -30 penalty, the -111 penalty, or the 950 penalty, you're likely not going to get off the hook by just de-optimizing a site.
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Well, I could easily be wrong, but I don't think this is a "penalty" - I think it's just what the algo is supposed to do.

A penalty implies that a domain or page has been tagged as trouble. I tend to think that is still fairly rare.

I'm one of those people who thinks it's as big as a risk as a potential benefit to file reinclusions on most adult sites - because as we've been saying, adult sites are inherently close to googles current definition of spam.

As soon as you file reinclusion, google people are going to apply their investigative tools to the page. No adult site is going to get a great score under those tools.

It needs to be tested. Some folks should file reinclusions and see what happens. Some folks should make changes without reinclusions and see what happens.

I note that cutts didn't specifically say "penalty". Google has said many times that it wants the algo to do the work, and in the past known penalties have been very clear cut. I note that TGPs haven't been as badly affected by this (which I attribute to the greater number of oneway incomings, from all the abandoned galleries, something the algo would easily detect). One would expect they would be if there was a penalty.

So, I'm not convinced the concept of penalty applies. Only testing can tell.

Anybody done any reinclusions recently?