Original: David Airey
Published on October 5th, 2007
Yesterday, through a large increase in visitor numbers to my website, I discovered that my Google penalty has been lifted. In this article, I’m going to tell you why I was penalised by Google, what I did to have the penalty removed, and how you can avoid a similar penalty for your website / blog.
Last month, I asked for advice regarding a huge drop in my Google search rankings. For around six months prior to the drop, I ranked at #1 when searching for my name, David Airey. The penalty imposed on my website dropped this position from #1 to around #70 and I also lost rankings for a host of graphic design-related terms, making me a lot less findable.
What you thought had happened to my website
There was A LOT of differing opinion on this, found via:
- Comments here on my blog from last month
- A tale of Paid Link pain and woe on Sphinn.com
- Web Desinger Needs “Help” thread on the ihelpyou forum
- Google Punished My Site For Selling Links – Not! by Jim Boykin
I received advice from a number of people in the SEO trade, people like Danny, Doug and many others in the ‘ihelpyou’ forum I mentioned above.
David Hopkins, of Mutiny Web Design, kindly referred my Google penalty issue to Hamlet Batista, a seasoned search engine marketer. Hamlet wrote a great blog post about my predicament, and offered some stellar advice through our conversation in his blog post comments.
One of Hamlet’s comments, in particular, involved ‘diffusing a Google-bomb’, which I’ll come to shortly.
Why I actually got penalised by Google
First, however, and according to Matt Cutts himself (head of the Google spam team), my Google penalty was imposed for two main reasons:
- Having paid links to bad neighbourhoods
- Trying to game my search engine rankings with black hat SEO
On Matt’s blog, he took some time out of his no doubt hectic schedule, to make this comment about my situation:
…so the paid links for business card printing and ink cartridge refills are gone and won’t be coming back? The other thing I noticed is that it looks like you silently changed the terms of your contest and didn’t mention that to anyone.
I believe your original linking terms said:
“You can describe the draw any way you like, as long as you link to my homepage (www.davidairey.com) using logo / graphic design-related anchor text. A few examples of what you could link back with include: logo designer, best logos, Edinburgh graphic designer, graphic design in Scotland, great logos etc.”
What’s interesting about those two paid links that Matt mentions, is that the one for business card printing was automatically placed in my sidebar, after I signed up for Text Link Ads (TLA). When you sign up for TLA’s service, you install a plugin on your blog, and your site details are placed in the TLA marketplace. If someone wants to add a link to your blog, they pay TLA, you get 50% of the money, and the link to the customer’s site is placed on yours automatically. As far as I can remember, there’s no screening process.
The TLA website, whilst having a Google Page Rank of 7/10, doesn’t appear anywhere relevant when conducting a search via Google, so they seem to have a similar penalty imposed on them.
What’s also interesting, is that I had removed the TLA plugin, and stopped using their service, at the beginning of September. My Google penalty was imposed around September 18th, so it’s fair to say that I was doing a few things wrong.
The other paid link that was mentioned, for ink cartridge refills, was a private advertiser, so there’s more personal blame with this one, and I could’ve checked to see how ’safe’ their website neighbourhood was by using the Bad Neighborhood – Link Exchange Tool. I don’t know all that much about this tool, but from what I’ve read, it can help protect you if you’re unsure who you’re linking to. For instance, if you think that Google might look upon a website in a bad way i.e. it’s in a ‘bad neighbourhood’, then best to use the rel=”nofollow” code in your hyperlink, so search engines don’t count your link as a ‘vote’ (thumbs up). I’ve added the rel=”nofollow” tag to my link to the Bad Neighborhood tool, because oddly enough, after running that site through it’s own tool, there are some questionable ‘blog spam’ links shown.
If you have any info about the usefulness of the Bad Neighborhood tool, I’d love to know. Don Lawson at Affiliate Watcher asks some interesting questions about linking to bad neighbourhoods.
You can read more about what Matt Cutts has to say on paid links here. The blog post is a couple of years old, yet I believe it’s still relevant. For a more up-to-date point of view, Chris G recently asked, “Where do you stand on the paid links issue?” which makes for an interesting read.
The second point that Matt mentions, is the conditions I initially stated when running last month’s graphic design prize draw.
I asked entrants to link to my website using specific anchor text, in effect, I tried to ‘game’ my Google search engine ranking positions (SERPs). This is known as ‘black hat SEO’, which, according to About.com, is “customarily defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner.”
Ethics are very important to me, and I’ll not be conducting any similar techniques in future. A certain John Chow is well known for his continued Google penalty for black hat SEO.
Actions taken before my penalty was reversed
The first thing I did was to remove the paid links. Paid links aren’t against Google’s terms of service, but paid links without the rel=”nofollow” attribute are, and I didn’t use that tag. What’s even worse is when you accept payment for a link to a website in a ‘bad neighbourhood’.
Next, and on the advice of Hamlet Batista, I emailed all 250 people who published blog posts linking to my graphic design prize draw, asking them to remove any links to my site. I wanted to “diffuse the Google bomb”, as Hamlet put it. Thankfully, and within two days of my email, I received many replies from the prize draw entrants, telling me they’d removed the links. If you were one of those people, thanks so much for helping out, especially those of you who didn’t win anything in my draw.
After sending the link removal request, I filed a reinclusion request through Google’s webmaster tools. Filing this request doesn’t guarantee anything, and you might not hear anything back about your particular situation, but it’s an important part of the process. I provided as much information in the reinclusion request as possible, mentioning that I knew I did wrong with my black hat ‘Google-bomb’ tactic, that I’d contacted all prize draw entrants asking them to remove links, and that I’d also removed any paid links from my website.
For courtesy, I left a comment on Matt Cutts’ blog, informing him of my misdoings, my bulk email to recipients, and my reinclusion request. Very kindly, Matt responded to my comment, saying he’d have someone look into my reinclusion request. I can’t be sure if my request would’ve been granted, had Matt not stepped in, and so I’m really counting my blessings. Thanks again for your time, Matt.
3 steps to avoid a Google penalty
- Don’t participate in any form of black hat SEO
- Add the rel=”nofollow” tag to any paid links on your website
- Be careful not to link to bad neighbourhoods
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I’m not very clued in on SEO. These past few weeks, however, have taught me a lot about best-practice techniques.
If there’s anything written here that I’m off the mark with, I’d greatly appreciate your comments below. It’s a steep learning curve for me, but one that I’ve only just begun climbing.
A big thank you to everyone who has offered their thoughts and advice.
