A little while ago I remember Patrick from Blogstorm saying how he thought that one of his pages went supplemental because it was linking to a page on DigitalPoint.com. I figured it was probably just a coincidence - sites like Search Engine Roundtable link to the forums all the time, these sites would not rank at all if this were true.
However some new evidence has just come to the surface which further proves that linking to DigitalPoint.com could indeed be harmful. Now this evidence is not damming and it could easily be a coincidence, but it definitely made me wonder.
Here are the new PR scores for each of the SEO tool reviews on this site:
Can you spot the odd one out? What do you think? Is this just a coincidence? Or has Google well and truly deemed DigitalPoint.com a bad neighborhood that should not be linked to?
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
August 2nd, 2008
Image credit: google pagerank
Google really got serious about giving out PageRank penalties in October last year. Andy Beard was at the centre of attention and the following post, a long with a couple of others that he did got a lot of traction:
Google PageRank Update October 2007
The 7 in the title of this post is not a fixed number. I want to put together a big list of all of the most important sites/pages on the net that appear to have PageRank penalties.
Normally PR penalties are applied to sites selling text links outside of the Google guidelines, but in some of these cases I couldn’t find any paid links. The sites may have internal linking issues or there might be other reasons. I just know that all of the following sites should have a higher PageRank score:
Enn.com
Environmental News Network is and environment news site and hub that has been around since before 1997. The website currently has a Google PR of 4/10, it should be 8/10.
Update: I am pleased to report that Enn.com is no longer penalised. The website’ homepage now has a PageRank of 7/10.
Reason for penalty: Up until very recently this site was blatantly selling spammy text links in its footer. These are gone now so maybe the site is due for an update. Or maybe there is another reason.
Update: I am pleased to report that Enn.com is no longer penalised. The website’ homepage now has a PageRank of 7/10.
Fark.com
Fark is a very popular social news site and forum, which was established in 1999. The Fark.com homepage currently has a Google PageRank of 5/10, it should most probably be 8/10.
Reason for penalty: Anyone who can work out why this website is penalised will be given SEO god status - they nofollow everything. The only thing I can think of is the partner links - someone at Google may have mistaken these for payola.
Independent.ie
The Independent is a very popular Irish newspaper. The website currently has a Google PageRank of 4/10, it should have a Google PageRank of at least 7 out of 10.
Reason for penalty: Website is sneakily selling dofollow text links via a drop down menu in the top nav. which says more services.
Update: Someone has just pointed out to me that the sites that are linked to via the drop down menu are owned by the Independent, so it is possibly a mistake on Google’s part if those are indeed the cause. You read my initial reaction to seeing the links. It is easy to understand the difficulties Google spam engineers face when news sites are linking to commercial properties in that way. Even if they explain on a reinstatement that they own those sites, Google may still keep them penalised - purely because of their anchor text choices and the fact that they are linking from a trusted news source to highly commercial properties.
Online.WSJ.com
The Wall Street Journal is beyond important. The homepage of this site currently has a Google PageRank of 4/10. I am guessing that the site should have a PR of 8/10.
Reason for penalty: Unknown
STPT.com
According to Wikipedia in 1997 Starting Point was the 7th most trafficked site on the net. Sometime during the 1st few months of 2008 the sites PageRank dropped from 7 or 8 out of 10 to 5/10. At the April 2008 PageRank update the sites PageRank again fell, this time to 4/10.
Reason for penalty: The site has been penalised because of the directory of websites it has. Website owners can pay $99 per anum to have their website reviewed for a listing. IMO the directory is well maintained, but they need to make an effort to add more BOTW sites themselves.
TimesOnline.co.uk
The Times of London is one of the oldest and most well read and respected newspapers in the world. Website currently has a Google PageRank of 5/10 on its homepage, I am guessing it should be an 8/10.
Reason for penalty: Unknown, but there maybe some text links on the site somewhere that are leaking PageRank. I would say that if there is that it is probably just a mistake and not intentional.
Update: I am pleased to report that The Times is no longer penalised and back to a PageRank of 8/10.
W3Schools.com
Far more geeky then the rest of the sites, but equally important. The internet has been built on information provided by websites like this. Website homepage has a PR 5/10, it should be an 8 or a 9/10.
Reason for penalty: Website is blatantly selling dofollow text links.
If you know a really important site that has had its PageRank reduced just leave the URL, why you think it is important, your name and your website. If it is a good one it will be added to the list.
Update: Drew Broomhall from The Times has been in touch with me. Some unintended paid text links were the cause of the penalty. These links were nofollowed a long time a go, but the penalty remains.
I told Drew what he needed to do to get it back, but he did not seem overly concerned. He knows that PageRank penalties do not effect rankings or traffic. I have a feeling that now it has been talked about, it will get fixed.
Random thought: I have been trying to think of some reasons why a PageRank penalty could be bad for a website. Obviously for people in the SEM industry it is quite important. If you have a poor PageRank score, people might think that you are not very good at what you do. But what about other industries?
I have studied the effect of links from PageRank and -40 hit penalised sites and one thing that I am sure about is this: if the visible PageRank is not there then it cannot be passed. I am not suggesting that links from penalised sites do not work, because in some instances they definitely do. I believe that links from PageRank penalised sites do not pass as much trust and authority to the sites they link to.
So here is the only potential drawback for the publisher that I can think of: If you own other websites that you link to, then those sites will not be getting the credit they deserve in the search engines.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 26th, 2008
Image above: search result on google for searchengineland.com
Have any of you started to notice the new Google trend URL page results showing up in the SERPs? Here are a few examples:
It is only a few days since Google launched the Google trends for websites and already Google is often ranking in the top 10 with the Google trend URL pages that are indexed.
IMO: this is not a bad thing: for most URLs the pages really do offer good information. The information provided on the Google trend pages is far more useful then the information provided by many of the other competing URL sites, you know aboutus.org etc.
Also IMO: I am guessing this is a mistake on Google’s part and that they will robots.txt out the Google trend pages.
Update: Kevin Gibbons from SEOptimise has noticed exactly the same thing, click on the link below to visit his post:
Google Trends indexing website URL’s & ranking for brand queries
Update:As I suspected they would do, Google have robots.txt out the pages now. I guess it is a good job I am here to keep my eye on these things for them.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 24th, 2008
Up until about 2-3 months ago I was only aware of two real Google penalties. The outright ban, where a site will be completely removed from the Google index and the minus 40-60 penalty.
About 2-3 months ago I started talking to a local company about helping them with their SEO. It looked like they wanted to do something and they were just thinking things over. Next the guy called me up and said that all of his Google rankings had disappeared and that the only thing his site was coming up for was the name. The site came up no.1 for his two word company name and no.1 for the domain. However all of the other positions the site had with the homepage, albeit not good ones had disappeared. Even when I tried searching for some unique text off the homepage in quotes it did not come up. So I asked the guy a couple of questions, you know - have you made any changes recently that could have caused this to happen? etc. The guy said that the only thing he could think of was that he had placed a load of area names on the bottom of the homepage in tiny text so that no body could see. I said “bingo, that is why the site is penalised, you put hidden text on”. He got rid of the hidden text, I told him what to say to Google on the reinstatement request and his site was back to where it was previously within a week.
Again about 2-3 months ago I started to work on this new site and I came up with a temporary solution to get some link juice into the category pages. This was totally my fault and looking back it was really bad and stupid. This is the only time I have ever got a client penalised by any search engine. The site had about 130 categories and I placed an SEO friendly drop down menu on the homepage and the rest of the pages to the 130 categories. I saw some progress with the rankings initially, but around a week later the site got hit with the exact same penalty, this time it was not just the homepage that got hit, it was all of the pages where I had placed the drop down menu. It was ranking for the company name with and without Ltd, the domain and that was it. I was scared as hell, I had to tell this guy that I had got his site penalised. I spoke to the owner about it and he was so cool you have no idea, it is a good job I choose my clients carefully. Now technically I had done nothing wrong, but it looked seriously spammy - I showed it to a friend and he said “no wonder you got penalised, you’ve got hidden text, hidden links and keyword stuffing” (not technically right, but that is what it looked like). I am still waiting for the developers to finish the new site on this one. Once the site is finished I will ask the owner to send a reinstatement request, hopefully Google will forgive me for being so aggressive.
Weather this is a new penalty or not I do not know. It is different to the minus penalty because when pages are hit they do not show up anywhere, no matter what. It is different to the outright ban because effected sites stay in the index and rank for their own names. Have any of you ever seen a penalty like this? It can definitely be applied for hidden text, it could possibly be applied for hidden links or keyword stuffing.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 19th, 2008
Image Credit: google bot
So it’s been nearly two weeks since I re-launched this site and Google has still yet to pick the two new services pages. About a year or so ago the Googlebot would have picked those pages up in a couple of days easily.
The blog is getting crawled fine and I am sure that this post will be indexed within a couple of hours of me posting. It just seems to be regular web-pages that are getting neglected by Google. This could possibly be because the Googlebot is paying too much attention to blogs etc. in my opinion.
It is not just this site’s regular web-pages that do not get crawled as fast any more. I work on many websites and generally Google does not seem to be picking stuff up as fast.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 7th, 2008
