Google's 950 Penalty

[Maj. Stress]

Originally Posted by grandmascrotum

I was thinking of this site: www.sexforwomen.net

It only has one link exchange and is made primarily of articles. I haven't changed it in ages, and it's probably overoptimised. It's also guilty of interlinking between my own sites. This site is on page 10 for numerous keywords.

There was a time, way back in the distant past, when it was number 1 for a quite a few phrases.

I'm thinking I need to go and nofollow all my own links to see what happens.

Is the "distant past" around 2002? There were some interlinking tricks that worked back then that will get filtered out nowdays.

[CaptainJSparrow]

Bill, I don't have all the answers...wish I did. I'm throwing ideas up for discussion. I'm fairly convinced that there is a penalty that alot of our (meaning that group of sites that all interlink) sites are suffering from. When you look at the back of the index, you'll see alot of pages from most of those sites buried there. If you look at alexa's traffic details, you'll see that alot of those sites all fell about the same time.

Whether it's a penalty, or an algo change, we all need to try to figure it out and try to get out from under it.

My company still has sites/pages that do very well with google. We are trying to be pro-active and working to keep those sites/pages from falling. Of course, we've lost placements too and we're trying to get those back.

My best guess regarding an answer to your question #2 is that our (I'm referring to everyone's sites, not just the ones that we own) little group of 100 or so Link Lists are certainly not the only adult sites on the 'net. We barely scratch the surface. We have, however, all placed well in the past for lots of terms. Linking outside of our network is certainly necessary. Finding sites within this network that have been buried, are not being cached by google, have not been updated by the webmaster for a long period of time, etc and ending link exchanges with these folks is probably not a bad idea.

It's a trial and error thing. We can't just sit still and hope that placements come back. That said, the "Chicken Little" syndrome will not help anyone here. Open discussions, bouncing ideas back and forth, and trying new strategies seem to be what's called for.

[Bill]

Originally Posted by CaptainJSparrow

Whether it's a penalty, or an algo change, we all need to try to figure it out and try to get out from under it.

And that's really the interesting and important thing - how to adapt to these new conditions.

I'm glad that you're doing some tests on this.

I do tend to think we are in a situation where we'll need to be pretty creative and thoughtful to come up with a solution.

[spacemanspiff]

We've been the bad networks from the beginning. We exist for purely commercial purposes, despite the pretense of giving away free content. Everything we do violates google guidelines, from their perspective.

I've heard this a lot and I'm just not convinced that this is the case. I just don't think that Google penalizes a website because it's mainly commercial in nature. Even though they're sitting up their on their mountain, hugging trees and knocking back Starbucks by the gallon, they're in this to make a buck (or a couple billion) just like the rest of us.

Think about this. Joe surfer goes online and searches for "ink cartridges". What is he looking for. "The history of the ink cartridge" or "how to properly dispose of the ink cartridge". No. He wants to buy some ink cartridges. If all he gets is informational sites, he's packing has cyber bags and heading for Yahooville.

I do a lot of searches for recipes. If you think the adult spaces are ad driven, try searching for "chicken and dumplings" (mmmm, chicken and dumplings). Usually what you'll see is a three column table, with the recipe in the middle surrounded by ads for all kinds of culinary junk.

We may have a rep as a bad neighborhood but that's probably because you see a lot more blackhat in adult. Or maybe it's because of guys like Jerry Falwell, although he's now irrelevant as his maker has called him home where he'll spend eternity in a latex bustier and thigh-high boots watching Hit Me Baby One More Time over and over, just like he always secretly wanted.

[Bill]

Originally Posted by spacemanspiff

(*1)I've heard this a lot and I'm just not convinced that this is the case. I just don't think that Google penalizes a website because it's mainly commercial in nature. ...

(*2)Think about this. Joe surfer goes online and searches for "ink cartridges". ... He wants to buy some ink cartridges.

(*3)I do a lot of searches for recipes. If you think the adult spaces are ad driven, try searching for "chicken and dumplings" (mmmm, chicken and dumplings). ...

(*4)We may have a rep as a bad neighborhood but that's probably because you see a lot more blackhat in adult. Or maybe it's because of guys like Jerry Falwell, ...

Well, I should have added the disclaimer that _it has been my theory for a long time_ that google has long regarded all or almost all adult sites, especially our kind of adult sites, as being bad networks and a bad neighborhood.

As part of my general arguments about this, I would like to point out that adult INVENTED reciprocal linking, linking based on PR, making pages solely for commericial reselling purposes, and making and linking pages to game google - all the things that google has said it doesn't like.

But, my responses to your specific points would be:

*1 - no, I agree, not because it's commercial in nature.

But, adult sites agressively and continuously produce hundreds of thousands of pages intended to do very little but put advertising in front of viewers eyes. Especially the agressively SE spamming scripters, but the same is true also of ordinary adult marketers of all kinds.

We take commercialism to an excess, in googles eyes.

*2. Google would rather take the surfer straight to trustranked Hewlet Packard for ink cartridges, and not to every tom dick and harry reseller. As far as google can tell, we are all resellers.

*3. The impression I have, based on reading mainstream SEO information, is that recipe sites and all kinds of reseller sites are suffering just as much from the 950 as adult is, probably for the same reasons. They copied adult tactics. (I do agree there are tons of mainstream pages that are just as bad if not way worse than the crappiest adult pages - at least the pages not created by the scriptspammers.)

HOWEVER - recipe sites have at least a small chance of getting a link from the Trustrank network - and adult sites never will get such a link.

*4. I totally agree that a big part of the reason google has long considered adult a bad neighborhood is because of moral and religious objections to our content, including complaints from surfers about adult showing up for mainstream searches, and dirty tricks by shortsighted adult SE spammers, and possibly malware and the like.

---

The whole reason I'm discussing this is because of the theory of bad networks, and I got the impression that you are part of what I'll call the "school of the new bad networks".

("new" bad networks, because as far as I can tell the theory only works if you assume that there has occurred some recent [as in the last 9 months or so] increase in google picking out specific networks and tagging or flagging them as bad[der], while choosing some adult networks not to flag as bad.)

I think the "950" is caused not by networks but by a new algo that now ads a score for:

1 - percentage of reciprocal links.
2 - uniformity of anchor text
3 - percentage of oneway incomings
plus
4 - positions of links vs content (the links at the bottom of the page -page content analysis)
5 - duplicated content (because we are all reselllers selling the same things with the same phrases)
6 - phraseing analysis

... and, for every one of these things, almost ALL adult sites will score badly, and the algo will suppress them.

(and they are all things I think we know a lot more about than we know about the possibility of google adding new flags for _some_ bad networks.)

---

As a final note, I do totally agree that testing for the possibility that the theory of new bad networks might be the cause is totally valid, and I'm very interested to see how your tests turn out.

[Bill]

So, it seems to me the next level of questions would be:

How do you test for the different theories?

and,

What types of site and structural designs might work better in this new age of google?

As for the first question, the problem with testing is that it's tough to get systematic co-operation with something that is kinda zero-sum. If you do fair testing, some or many folks will end up, at least for a while, in the failure group, as in, "This strategy for linking and structure failed to get google traffic.".

As for the second question, certainly one of the current ideas is the blog. But, it's got it's problems, the biggest one being you still end up with "the group".

I've been thinking that a link-bait strategy might work - but sooner or later, you've got to monetize the link bait, or harvest the traffic, which usually means linking to a bad network.

[Halfdeck]

My understanding is that if you tag a link with "nofollow" then it will not improve search engine ranking. Is that not the general consensus?

Nofollow is a way to shield you from penalties. Google does not need them to detect artificial links.

You can also use nofollow to tweak PageRank flow through internal links. By spreading out PageRank to a targeted set of pages, you exert some influence over which pages Google includes in the main index.

I was thinking of this site: "www.sexforwomen.net"

1) Competition increases over time. If a site doesn't continue to gain inbound links, it will eventually be outranked.

2) A gradual loss of ranking is different from a sudden drop in ranking.

3) The site is 108 pages big, but I only see 8 pages in the main index. The reason is simply that you don't have many strong IBL to the domain. (e.g. "http://d.sankey.ca/blog/322/there-is-a-tv")

4) I agree the on-page text is over-optimized ("Sex for Women, orgasms, clit pumps, g spots, female ejaculation, anal sex, vibrators, adult videos, better sex, centrefolds")

Where have you folks derived this theory, which you have repeated a number of times, that being part of a network is the source of the problems?

Bill, no one is claiming that being part of a network is why people get smacked over the head with the 950 penalty. I'm not even claiming that the penalty exists. All I'm saying is that being part of a network makes artificial links much easier for Google to detect. And considering the fact that linking violations incur the harshest penalties, its something worth keeping in mind.

I understand you guys think it's a penalty, but I don't think you can claim that just because you are suddenly dropped in the serps

Rankings shift daily across various DCs. That shift might be due to several factors, including 1) a dramatic algo upgrade, 2) data refresh, 3) PageRank shift, 4) increase in competition, or 5) a penalty.

When a site that was ranking #1 for "free porn" suddenly plummets to 870th, you can rule out 4 because 870 urls aren't going to suddenly outrank you over night. You can rule out 2 because data refreshes usually will not lead to a loss of 870 positions. A PageRank shift (3) that knocks thousands of pages into the supplemental index is a possibility, but if your site has at least TBPR 5, you should not see huge fluctuations in the number of pages in the main index. As for #1, these days I don't expect Google to unleash monumental algo upgrades; its more likely that Googlers tweak their algo on different DCs so that you see slightly different results on different datacenters.

I'm not claiming that msnaughty.com, for example, is penalized, but I think the chances of it not being penalized is close to nil.

If ALL clusters of sites (for example grandma scrotums modest little personal network) are now networks that google penalizes, how could one ever escape networks?

It's ok to link into a network as long as the link is editorial. And it's also ok to get a link from a site belonging to a network as long as the link is editorial.

Yeah, I know, the problem with us is that its unnatural to link to our competition, and everybody is our competition. But blogs are changing all that.

If some networks are worse than others, how could you possibly tell which network is good and which one is bad?

Relevance and signals of quality. If everybody linked to sites they liked, there would be no bad neighborhoods. One thing to keep in mind is that adult webmasters aren't our only source of IBLs.

If just creating a standalone domain with no "risky" links to possibly bad networks was enough to grab #1s again, why do you think we haven't all discovered this already?

Bill, no one suggested you'll rank #1 by building a domain and not linking to crap. You obviously need people linking to you to rank.