Google penalised many sites for selling paid text links in October 2007. Their belief was that such text links interfered with their search engine, but it is possible that they had other motives (see AdSense, one of their main sources of income). The decision to penalise these sites was still extraordinary; if Google could detect these links, could Google not just have ignored these links?
Google claimed paid text links damaged the reliability of results to the searcher, and it is easily argued that they do. What Google fail to realise is through making an example of websites, they are making their results less useful.
Is it not ridiculous that in a search for ‘Text Link Ads’, the first result is not the very popular site of the same name but instead a post about Google penalising the site? TLA in fact only appear on the fifth page of results; which is stupid when I expect many users searching for ‘Text Link Ads’ will be primarily looking for that site.
Another example is Everyclick, the search engine which raises money for charity. A search for Everyclick fails to bring the search engine up until the seventh page. Even on the sevent, the result is not to their homepage. As it so happens, my review of Everyclick is actually on the second page.
That is what is completely stupid; reviews of the website, and press releases involving it, rank higher than the website itself. Is that good for the user? No. It’s not just me who finds this a bit odd; Will Critchlow did an entire post on the matter last year.
Will speculated that ‘the main problem is that they are being penalised by Google at the moment for duplicate content problems. They have gone out… got mentioned on a load of powerful charity domains. The problem from Google’s point of view is that these pages look very much like… lightly rehashed press release content’. So Google penalised a useful site on the sole basis of the type of marketing they utilised.
Google must stop penalising advertising. They must stop penalising both the advertiser and publisher. If Google wants to ‘beat’ such forms of advertising, the way in which to do it is not to destroy their index but to simply teach their bots to ignore such advertisements.
Thanks for the link, Joe.
I can see why Google wants to protect itself from manipulation, but I think the everyclick example in particular is a step too far. I can’t see why they would not want them to be found for a search for their own name…
Maybe a googler will stop by eventually and let us know their thoughts.
Hi Joe,
Thanks for giving us a mention and sticking up for Everyclick here!
We’re still not completely sure why Everyclick.com was penalised in October. The site was listed first for ‘everyclick’ when suddenly it was kicked down to 63. It also listed right behind big charities’ own websites for ‘fundraise for…’ and now doesn’t. We’ve fixed a couple of possible points and submitted the site for reconsideration a few weeks ago, but no luck so far.
Some people have mentioned before they believe it is because Everyclick is a search engine, but our results are syndicated from Ask.com and we don’t believe we compete with Google in the same field. Everyclick is a fundraising platform, not only a specialised search engine any more.
We will keep investigating but I think that only Google really knows the answer to this one.
Fascinating stuff Joe, I’d not really registered any of this was happening although occasionally I’d be surprised by a search result – I can’t remember what they were off the top of my head but I shall have to do some investigating tonight to see if it’s related.
Really interesting post, thanks for making me connect the dots on something I’d kinda-subconsciously flagged but not got around to looking into!
Merry Christmas too!
Everyclick appears to have had its penalty lifted over Christmas to some extent.
We made one change before Christmas and can confirm that the penalty had nothing to do with Everyclick being a search engine, or duplicate content issues, or links. In fact all the reasons which have been discussed here and elsewhere had no relevance to the penalty.
We’re now working on getting the rest of the site returned to decent positions in Google’s listings.