On Friday the New York Times published a piece by David Segal that alleged several high profile companies were trying to game Google’s algorithm with paid links.
If this sounds familiar to you, that’s because this is nothing new for Segal or the NY Times. In February Segal profiled what he claimed were JC Penney’s efforts to rank for a whole host of generic terms such as dresses, furniture, bedding and the like.
That article received a lot of attention in the internet marketing world, and even prompted Google to penalize J.C. Penney.
When an article generates that kind of buzz, it’s only a matter of time before a page-view-hungry publication like the NY Times circled back for a second bite at the apple.
Judge Google Presiding
This time around Segal targeted not one but four high profile companies in the flower space, tying the article with the weekend’s theme of Mother’s Day. Once again the story spread quickly through the SEO space with a few bloggers quickly declaring the companies guilty in the court of public opinion.
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Unfortunately for the NY Times, the judge didn’t order a public execution this time around. Rather than admitting to a second embarrassing incident of their algorithm being gamed, Google claimed they already knew about the links and “none of the links shared by The New York Times had a significant impact on our rankings, due to automated systems we have in place to assess the relevance of links.”
The accused sites continued to rank for their targeted terms (in fact 1800flowers, the only site to receive a direct link in the NY Times, took over the top spot), Google was able to avoid the truth of another algorithm embarrassment, and the NY Times got their temporary page-view fix, so no harm, no foul right? Well, we’ll see.
As any desperate crack addict will tell you, people do things they would never have imagined they’d do, just to get their next fix. Sadly, it seems the NY Times has succumbed to their craving for page-views and is now (perhaps unwittingly) playing the roll of SEO hitman for anyone willing to serve their competition up on a silver platter.
Of course, that demand for that service has been forming for years.
SEO Police on Steroids
The debate over “outing” or reporting sites to Google has raged for years. While some “outers” claim to only be interested in improving Google’s results, for most SPAM simply stands for “Sites Positioned Above Mine.”Whether it’s outing a competitor in hopes of outranking them (as seen above), or it’s outing sites simply for the attention it generates, the existence of SEO police is nothing new.
However, desperate “white-hat” advocates frustrated by constantly being outranked, have begun to realize Google spam reports and outings on industry blogs are much less effective than making Google look bad publicly.
SEO Hitman for Hire, No Proof Needed!
Disturbingly absent in either of Segal’s pieces is any shred of proof that the accused sites were actually guilty.
Sure they found an SEO agency willing to make accusations in exchange for publicity, but the existence of spammy links is hardly a smoking gun despite what some SEO’s seem to believe.
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Believe it or not, it’s not very difficult (or expensive) to obtain thousands of links, especially if you don’t care about quality. Many of the links will be virtually useless for SEO purposes, but it wouldn’t take long to make a competitor’s link profile look awfully fishy.
Absent a confession or a receipt, there’s simply no way to prove who paid to have any link created. The difference between first and second in Google has such an enormous financial impact, there’s a built-in incentive to sabotage a competitor’s rankings in any way possible.
At a time when SEO savvy companies have link building budgets of six figures or more, does it seem far fetched that a company might employ a third party to spam a competitor’s link profile and then out the site to the NY Times or any other publication looking for their page-view fix?
Imagine for a moment how much attention and coverage a story about President Obama “spamming” Google as part of his re-election campaign would receive. Do you think for a minute the Times, Huffington Post, Fox or any of the thousands of political blogs would care whether the White House was ACTUALLY behind the spammy links?
How tough would it be for an attention hungry SEO to fabricate and sell TMZ a story about Lindsay Lohan’s agent trying to spam Google in an attempt to clean up the actress’ reputation? Well, we’ll see.
Of course, none of that matters to the New York Times, or subsequently Google. When paid links and publicity are involved, it seems a site is guilty until proven innocent, collateral damage and unintended casualties be damned.
Google Creating SEO Mafia
Google has waged war on paid links for years, largely because they’re incredibly effective at manipulating Google’s rankings.
They’ve asked users to report their competition, publicly slapped the wrists of their own properties to further spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and have even implied paid links are FCC violations, all in an attempt to save their algorithm which relies heavily on in-bound links.
However, by allowing low-quality or paid in-bound links and a bit of publicity to destroy a site’s rankings, Google instead is creating a market for SEO hitmen and extortionists.
How soon until we see more and more targeted SEO assassinations presented under the guise of “outing”? How soon until webmasters receive extortion emails threatening to create thousands of low quality links to a site unless we pay for a “protection” plan?
Google’s official answer to the question of whether or not a competitor can hurt your rankings claims:
There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question.
Of course, contacting the webmaster of a site linking to yours will do little good if the webmaster has been paid by your competition or is the one blackmailing you.
We’ll See…
Google claimed to be trying to prevent their results from being financially influenced.
White-hat “outers” claimed to be seeking to improve Google’s results and “level the playing field.”
But together they’ve turned desperate publications like the New York Times into attention-whores willing to perform SEO assassinations in exchange for a few page views. What impact will this have on link buying, link building, and Google’s algorithm?
As the Zen master says, well, we’ll see…