How Google Profiles SEO’s
The blogging world has been all abuzz recently with the comments from the head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts, that Google profiles SEO’s like common criminals. They are considered “high risk” and “people who do things deliberately for links”. What brought the story about?
On May 27, Google gave free Android phones to everyone in attendance of their I/O conference in San Francisco. Within an hour, one of the phones was on Ebay, eventually selling for over seven hundred dollars. By the next day, Android had received over fifty thousand new links to their website, many as a direct result of the Google conference. Now here is where the story gets interesting. Michael Gray, owner of ViralConversations.com does the same kind of giveaways that Google did. Yet he must tell the recipients of his contests to use a nofollow link or risk a penalty from Google.
A nofollow link tells a search engine spider to ignore the data. It is useful to keep spammers from commenting on your site since it doesn’t increase the popularity of a spam page, but it is damaging for search engine optimization. ThatDanny.com explains why, “When you link to a site, you are basically “voting” for it, and your “vote” increases its popularity in search engine rankings. Every additional link on a page dilutes the “voting power” of all the other links on that page. This is especially important because internal links in a website (links to your own pages) also count. By diluting your page’s votes, you are diluting your ability to make your own pages popular or those of genuine websites you like.”
Other high-profile bloggers also receive perks and expensive prizes without any recompense from Google such as Guy Kawasaki receiving an Audi Q7 in exchange for blogging about it. That certainly sounds like “people doing things deliberately for links” to me. Why wasn’t he penalized? Google’s penalty is being banned from search results, which is a death-blow to most sites. Michael Gray claims that what Google is doing is basically a form of racial profiling against SEOs. Jeremy Lubke of Xuru.com breaks it down more simply, “Google is determined to make any scalable link building process blackhat.”
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Blog Optimization Tips, Link Building Tips | seowhitehats | July 9, 2009
“Google is determined to make any scalable link building process blackhat.” – I would tend to agree that Google tries to make our job very difficult. However, as they move the goalposts, so to speak, so we work out new strategies to positively influence the rankings. It’s a funny old business we are in, and a funny old game of cat and mouse!