Google Backlink penalties are again being applied

Category: Google, Link Baiting, Link Building, SEO

There is a very interesting discussion thread over at Google Groups involving Matt Cutts.

Basically, a website owner complained that his website was penalized by Google and many rankings where lost (-xx penalty). After a leangthy discussion, Matt Cutts joined in and pointed this out:

ShyBoy, have you been collecting backlinks in any unusual ways? It
looks like you may have, and I would pay special attention to that.
For example, if you had been attempting to get PageRank via paid links
on various templates, then when that PageRank stops flowing (e.g. if
Google improves its detection in various ways), the fact that you have
less PageRank can also mean that a site won’t rank as well.
If that applies to you, my advice would be to pay special attention to
that issue, in addition to the other good advice you’ve already
gotten.
Matt

If you keep reading the discussion, you will notice what Matt is talking about. Not only did the website owner purchase links (which is considered bad by Google) he also probably paid for his link to be displayed in a wordpress theme template as the designer. See an example here (look at the bottom of page)

So, what has happened is that the site got 100’s of backlinks from webmasters using the wordpress theme for their blog and leaving the design credits and backlink. Unfortunately, many of the blogs where off-topic and have nothing to do with the linked website which is about furniture.

This is quite an extreme case of a backlink campaign but really demonstrates a very important lesson that Google is moving back toward penalizing websites for “unusual” backlinks. This was the case over a year or two ago but I feel Google has been very lenient the past 18 months on this issue as it was possible to attack your competitors by pointing back links to them.

Now, it seems Google maybe coming back to the backlink penalty rules which I think is a good thing. One noteworthy comment out of this thread was by the user JLH:

The site may have been ranking higher than it
should have been before. Now that they’ve discovered and subsequently
devalued the paid links it has sunk to its appropriate rankings. The
reason I bring this up, that if I am correct in my reading of Matt’s
comment, then even after a reconsideration request is filed and looked
at, you may not see a regain in rankings since the higher rankings you
were enjoying before were false to begin with. What appears like a
penalty is really not, and therefore there is nothing to be removed.
I just want to prepare you for that possibility.

The thread continues with over 140 comments and is well worth the read :)

Also, a voting pole over at seroundtable.com asked the question “are these penalties back link related?”

The results were as follows:

• 47% said Yes (50 responses)
• 28% said No Idea (30 responses)
• 25% said No (26 responses)

I made a post last week named: Google Webmaster Tools needs inbound link opt out like Yahoo!

It looks like this feature of being able to “reject” incoming links to your site is a must to avoid competitors abusing this backlink penalty system and attacking competitors in the same industry.