Google letters to webmasters over unnatural back links

Porn sites are exempt from Google's guidelines.

Lol Damage. Only if it were so.

They'll send these to any site found not following Google's webmaster guidelines.

Google are getting much better at this stuff.

Why would anybody want to use Google's services? Silly!!!!

Not using Google's services wont magically exempt you from being punished by Google for bad practices.

Why would I want to give them the info in the first place? Let them find it on their own ....

Superbientem animus prosternet!

They already have all the info. They don't magically learn anything new about your site when you add your site to webmaster tools.

Google Cloaking :-)

This is even better --> from Google blog as of yesterday:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...h-quality.html

If half the effort some webmasters put into trying to game the system was put into creating really good content for people then a lot less webmasters would be whinging about how Google spanked them

You are absolutely right. That's for normal people.

Smart people see Google like a liquor store without cashier and no security guard. Why wouldn't they take some bottles without paying for them?

The Rodney King Theory?

You're not looking so smart once Google spanks the shit out of you and you're left with a devalued site nobody will visit or worse banned from the index.

The only people that seem to bitch when a Google update comes around are people with 1000 spam blogs or tubes with nothing but scraped duplicate content.

I know of webmasters that refuse to acknowledge that Google traffic is the best and they try to bury their heads in the sand. Kinda dumb if you ask me. Google traffic is the best, by far. It is every webmaster's choice however if he chooses to not try to get Google traffic or whatever.

That said, I'm just curious if Google sent those letters out to porn sites or not. My understanding is that they sent out over 700,000 over the last 2 months but I have not heard of one porn site getting one.

It's not about you or me. There are various possibilities to use Google's guidelines. One of them is negative SEO that seems to be a result of recent changes. Instead of letting spam work for you, you let it work against competitors by donating spammy links to them. I am NOT endorsing any seedy way of playing the system, but find Google's approach is going to fail and they will revert some of their recent changes in valuating links.

I would listen to AdultKing, I have followed what he said and i never get a negative effect from google changes.

I never receive a warning letter, I just get shut down. And I generally have no clue how to fix things as I have no clue what I did wrong.

Google banned one of my sites for two years - never told me what I had to fix, didn't have a clue what I did wrong - then the site magically reappeared in Google's listings - without me changing a thing.

Fuck Google. I'm not going to sweat over their bullshit anymore.

You can appeal a Google slap with a re-consideration request.

http://www.adultking.co.uk/website-banned-by-google/

Yeah, they are bad ass. I had a website go from 30k Google hits a day down to 2k and no explanation. After 2 years I removed a small paragraph on index page that was stating this site was meant for consenting adults and not related to anything illegal. Guess what happened. My site shot up to 30k Google hits a day again and stays there ever since. Go figure.

Look for a post I made a few weeks ago. The mainstream site was successively appealed. =]

wasnt able to find it. can you link it here? thanks

ok, it's a brand new day and I am still wondering if anyone has received one of those letters from Google saying that their porn site has unnatural back links?

I missed that post of yours before. My main argument against using Google is their ability to use your login data, browsing history and entries into their services to analyze and sandbox sites to places where they don't belong. I.e. they might view differences in your local position and the area you serve as inconsistent with websites visited and look at you as a possible spammer. I am sure people from the Philippines or India are able confirm what I am saying.

I don't start many threads. Look for it.

A uses GA, GWT, Adsense,...
B uses no Google services.

Unless B is a total idiot, Google will have tons more info on A than on B.

There are some who believe Google may be on a fishing expedition with these letters. Who knows? But it wouldn't surprise me if some webmasters receiving the messages have already confessed some link trading "sins" to the big G in hopes of preventing a smack down. After thanking them for their honesty, Google can proceed to ruthlessly smite them from the search results.

acrylix...yep I read that theory too. It is highly possible, even probable. Google does practice a bit of sleight of hand in dealing with the webmaster community.

So far, I have not heard of one adult site that has gotten that letter. I've suspected that Google just treats porn sites different from other sites. I mean, there is no way that they do not know which of the well known sites are buying links yet they do not penalize them.

I recently found tons of message board links to one of my sites that was obviously done maliciously to penalize the site...and they worked. That said, I have not received a letter from Google saying that it detected unnatural links and trust me these links are horrible. They linked to pages on my site using phrases like:

british virgin islands sewer
dizzy up the girl mediafire
cover girl foundation color
real estate in the us virgin island
free onling drees a girl

I have reported those links to Google but getting them to believe that I had nothing to do with them is next to impossible.

Google will already know how much of their traffic goes to B and how much of that traffic bounces back to Google. Google will already know everything Webmaster tools provides about that site.

There's really nothing that Google needs to know about your site that they don't already know before you subscribe to any of their services.

They won't necessarily know which sites you own and how you interlink them.

Perhaps, however that doesn't affect the webmasters who understand that it's not links from your own sites that you want, it's links from other sites who find what you have to offer worth linking to that you really want.

If you have something worthwhile then other people will link to it on websites and in social media like Google + , Facebook and Twitter. These are the links that webmasters should strive for and the sure fire way to get them is to create high quality sites that surfers love.

We're in the middle of a seismic shift in the way Google values links anyway, they have said time and time again that the focus is on quality. They have said it in different ways such as the Farmer and successive Panda updates.

"that Google needs". There's no way of knowing what Google wants to know. Simply because you assume they use x amount of data doesn't mean they don't use or collect y amount of data.

And if you use GA or Adsense on a site, you are giving Google access to tons of information they otherwise would not have access to.

SEO isn't about building sites with quality content. That's simply "publishing content".

SEO is all about controlling the amount of information someone like Google can collect about your sites. Obviously building quality sites is an integral part of most SEO strategies, but it's only that: a part of the strategy.

I've never seen any reliable evidence that using these tools can negatively affect sites.

In fact many very large and well positioned web sites use these tools, along with other tools like Raven tools to manage their SEO campaigns.

Giving Google more information on your sites and how they are all interlinked is not a bad idea if you are squeaky clean. Why not use all the tools they provide? But 95% of the people reading this aren't squeaky clean. The more you give Google the more they possibly can find to penalize you for. If all your sites are easily linked together and they decide to get you, you might be royally fucked if they decide to penalize ALL your sites. You can say it never happens but you can't say it will never happen. Things can always change and there is no sure way to take back giving them all that data, is there?

This is why I've stopped buying and started building instead. Better to focus on quality than build a bunch of crap that works for less than a month.

Are Google's webmaster guidelines that difficult to stay within that as many as 95% of this board's population can't follow them ? It's all good practice anyway and all aimed at ensuring that websites provide some value to end users (surfers).

I think many webmasters miss out on enormous opportunity with their sites. Having a site that people enjoy visiting and trust buying from referral links is far better than having sites which serve not much purpose other than being link or spam farms.

If your site is highly desirable and of value to the surfer then it's in Google's interest to serve it up to the end user. Google can only maintain it's advertising revenue if it remains the most trusted search engine. That trust is upheld only by delivering the most relevant results to a users search query.

The data exchange is a trade off, the contract is basically along the lines of "we'll use your data in exchange for providing webmasters useful information about their website." As things stand there is more value in having that information than ignoring it.

QFT

Learned that the hard way.

As an 'outsider', someone who isn't privy to Google's internal secrets, there is no way to prove what works and what doesn't. There's no way to prove doing x will hurt you and doing y won't hurt you.

You're up against a black box. You don't know what kind of data Google collects how they use it.
There's no way to prove the existence of a causal connection between doing Z and getting A or B as a ranking. At best you can point out some kind of correlation.

That's a logical fallacy. The fact that site X uses service Y does not prove that using service Y hurts you or won't hurt you.

There's nothing wrong with buying links as long as you buy them from a reliable source, from someone who knows what he's doing. Personally, I wouldn't buy links from 90% of the sellers out there. However, I do still spend some decent money every month on buying links.

I couldn't care less what Google's guidelines are. Google's not some almighty God we should worship or beg for guidance. Google's a company. A company that wants to make money. A company that offers (free) services and information in order to attract traffic and then tries to monetize that traffic. Guess what I do? I run a business. I want to make money. I offer (free) services and information in order to attract traffic. I then try to monetize that traffic.

Google's not my friend. Google's a competitor. A competitor with a lot more resources and capital than me. A competitor that doesn't give a shit about me or my business.

Why does Google encourage webmasters to focus on 'good quality content'? Because they scrape and use that content as part of their business model.

Of course I'm smart enough to understand that I can benefit from the way Google uses the free services I offer. I'm also smart enough to understand that if a significant part of my income comes from Google, I'm in a vulnerable position. I therefor try to minimize that risk. How? By hiding as much as I can about what I'm doing from my competitors (including Google). After all, isn't Google doing exactly the same? They keep most of their inner workings a secret. They have their own disinformation agent. etc


I get the impression your opinion about the matter is based on 2 assumptions:
1. That all sites that are promoted using seo tactics that violate Google's guidelines are not useful to visitors. (not enjoyable for users to visit).
2. That webmasters who don't violate Google's guidelines have nothing to fear from Google.

Make no mistake about it. Google doesn't give a shit about your site. They don't give a shit about your income. They care about THEIR income, not yours.


How is Google supposed to know that your site is desirable and of value to the surfer. That is purely subjective. There's no such thing as an objective measure of usefulness. Google makes a guess about how many users have already displayed certain signs that they found a site to be useful to them. With billions of pages out there and Google only displaying a very limited amount of them to its users, I'd be insane if I didn't put any information out there that could be interepreted by Google as a sign of confidence in my sites.

I disagree. Google sets out it's webmaster guidelines. Following it's guidelines will ensure that you don't get slapped with a penalty in the SERPs that it serves up. It's also possible through testing to come up with strategies that will help your results. After all everything in what we do online can be measured with metrics and end results.

Of course. Google isn't about to release a road map for gaming the system, but it does make statements clearly outlining the things it disapproves of. Avoiding doing those things will ensure they don't penalize you.

It does go down to trust however. Large mainstream companies use Raven Tools and by definition use Google Analytics, Webmaster tools and AdSense. Somewhere along the line the decision has been made that using these tools provides benefit. I know from personal experience that using these reporting tools has not hurt me. Your mileage may vary.

I agree, however Google's webmaster guidelines are generally good practice irrespective of whether Google wrote them or not. Things like not having too many ads above the fold, not running sites as spam link sinks, ensuring that a sensible linking and site structure is maintained all add to user experience. If you want to keep your visitors, monetize them and gain their trust then all these things that Google ask you to do help in that respect. The Google webmaster guidelines wont hurt you at all.

Be that as it may, I'm yet to see traffic that converts better than targeted SE traffic. As Google is the major provider of SE traffic it's probably a good idea to ensure you don't get horribly slapped by them.

So what is the alternative ? A world without search engines ?

That's your prerogative, nobody forces you to use Google's tools. My contention is, however, that using them doesn't necessarily hurt you unless you're doing things that are bad practice anyway.

Sites that don't follow Google's best practices usually have some negative effect to surfers. The most common example is a site boosted in ranking because of spam links. The site itself may be wonderfully enjoyable, unfortunately all those spammy sites that link to it are not. There is a cost somewhere and the cost is that the web is larger than it needs to be in order to house spammy links. I could go on with more examples but you get my drift.

Google has many signals it can use to tell if your site is likely to be desirable. Some include bounce messages to end users asking people who bounce quickly back to the SERPs if they want to block a site. Social signals, time on site and traffic signals, page layout algorithms, semantic text algorithms the list goes on.

I have two points. Firstly I don't think following Google's webmaster guidelines can do anything else other than help you in the SE results and secondly that using Google's tools if you do follow their guidelines shouldn't hurt you. I find their tools useful, you may not and that's your choice.

Google has no right to set out any guidelines. Show me any law that allows them to do so. They are an arrogant bunch of people who want to keep others contained in stone age so they make more money.

lol. It's their search engine.

Precisely.

Still, they are not above the law.

I don't accept their rules, but they send me a lot of traffic.
Go figure.

I honestly hope Google gets even more strict in dealing with thin websites. People need to realize that repeatedly presenting the product in a lazy, haphazardly fashion devalues the product in a way similar to that of piracy.

Have you seen this network? I think it's Medium Pimpin.

http://www.clubellamilano.com/

That entire network is one big piece of garbage and it will be a great day for the industry when each and every one of it's shitty sites gets slapped to oblivion.

You cannot server lobster on a bed of shit!

Fucking awesome!

"Moderators and some advertisers seem to be joined in a brothers' club providing them with divine posting powers while criticism of such Gods, their friends and advertisers can be reason for quick bans - although you might be correct in fact."

http://www.megamasters.com/resource/gfy-webmaster-board