18 Comments

  1. Backlinks and anchor text have always been tricky, this post is highlight alot about them but, more research is needed. thanks a ton

  2. Everyone will be safe if they no-follow link with anchor text. You can also do-follow link and be safe if it is some kind of generic keyword like click here or similar. The way things are going , we’ll soon have no-follow links only or else…

  3. Bottom line…Google sucks! But seriously, don’t they realize that their search engine is not just their own site that they can do whatever they want. They are the face of search, and if they don’t follow their own best practices, then they are just creating their own monster.

    I sure wish another search engine would grab market share & give them competition to get them off their bully pulpit.

    1. Hopefully duckduckgo will 🙂

    2. I totally agree with you @Kris, Google should even thank us because we are the ones giving the infomations needed on their results. Giving penalty for only just 1 link is outrageous!

  4. If it is one outbound link that can get a site banned, its not a good day for any site owner. I have heard a lot really smart people, many of whom I admire called this a FUD campaign and I am starting to agree. The fact that Matt Cutts has questionable content and links on his site should raise more then just a few eyebrows.He even links to his ted talk. Sure Matt your are right and we are all wrong. He did state at Pubcon, that he needed to clean up Goolge’s image. However all the negative chattter is not helping the brand. I think the real reason Doc and MBG were punished was to scare people.

  5. Hi, Jennifer-
    Last night I received notification that my penalty had been revoked, 4-1/2 days after I submitted the reconsideration request… pretty much in line with the response time we have typically seen in other cases. I doubt my brand has the horsepower behind it to warrant any special attention, though. 😉

    I suspect that they unleashed a special algo, just to go after a “blog network” (the mbg algo? LOL)… it swept me up in its net, and when the algo flagged my site as suspect, an overzealous human reviewer okayed a manual penalty. That poorly thought out action left a little egg on Matt’s face, but he had to support the action, which I fully understand.

    The real issue that we should be focused on is the whole penalization issue, both philosophy and process. I didn’t get hurt by this penalty, as all my business comes from word of mouth and referrals. But a lot of others get hit by such wide-sweeping penalties, and many of them DO get hurt. That I felt no financial impact and that my penalty has been revoked doesn’t alter the fact that many people ARE financially impacted by such arbitrary penalties.
    A lot of those folks are honestly trying to comply in every regard… but when some standards are clear as mud and some changes conflict with published standards, it’s very difficult for them to stay in Google’s good graces.
    By the way, I love what you did with your links! 😉 A shame it might be necessary, though.

    1. PotPieGirl says:

      Hi Doc =) Thanks so much for stopping by!

      I saw your follow up post sharing that your penalty seems to be fixed – that’s great, super glad to hear it! (that post is here if anyone wants the complete “rest of the story” from Doc).

      Super sad for those that these penalties are really going to hurt. It’s tough online to begin with, but when your entire customer base is dependent on the free traffic from one online directory (ie, Google), well…things can go wrong very quickly.

      Not too different from the ‘real world’ – take as an example some random brick and mortar business that has prime location and BOOMS from just the drive by traffic. They don’t feel as if they need to get out there and diversify their customer generation tactics – business is awesome. Then one day, the city comes along and changes the traffic flow and it no longer goes by their business. If they don’t already have a strong base of true fans, it hurts.

      Anyway…. in this situation with MBG, I hope everyone affected comes out for the better as the dust settles.

      As for my “wikipedia” links here – yeah, it might come to that and I hate it. I love linking to my helpful sources IN my content – not as some list of citations at the end.

      Again, thank you so much for stopping by!

      Jennifer

  6. They have been penalizing Websites for single links for years. The SEO community has gone off the deep end with these hysterics.

  7. The sad reality is that there’s no such thing as a “safe” link anymore. Any link at any time can be seen as “unnatural” whether it is or isn’t. I honestly believe most legit SEOs are more than happy to play by the rules. The problem is that the rules are extremely unclear, they constantly change and when they do, the penalties are retroactive.

    These retroactive penalties are the equivalent of the police giving you a speeding ticket because you went 65 mph on a road 2 years ago and that road’s speed limit changed to 55 mph last month.

    1. PotPieGirl says:

      Agreed! The speeding ticket analogy is a good one!

  8. FYI Jen, your footnote links all lead back to your home page. The link URL is in the link title but there’s no way to access it without either a) typing it in manually or b) viewing your source code.

    1. PotPieGirl says:

      Hahahahahha – how funny! Didn’t notice that at all – coulda sworn I tested them, too!

      Thank you for pointing that out! You’re the best!

  9. This was a pretty scary read and I’m linking to it in a post I’ve got dropping today. We’ve got an industry site getting a lot of link removal requests lately but all the links given on this site are editorial within amazing content. The site doesn’t sell links or even allow guest blogging and is one of the largest hubs for the industry it’s involved in.

    The latest link example given that made me so annoyed was in an interview with a CEO of a company. The end of that interview has a link to the website and a few of the social networks and that’s it…it was cited as a bad link in the “love” letter from Google.

  10. Nice post, its been like this for a while though, about 5 years ago we managed to move a client from 3rd place to page 5 with one link; took the link down about 48hours later and boom back to position 5 i think i recall…

    Although its annoying, it does give you something to bill for other than link building, cleaning up link profiles and adding links to the disavow all seems more and more part of a modern link building strategy, but yea, watch the anchor texts these days hay!

    Thanks for sharing nice to read its not all plain sailing.

    IdcX

  11. These back linking penalties are so stupid and google has too much control of the market.

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