Testing the environment

21 April 2012
Bob Sakayama

Google's recent crackdown on inorganic links has enabled an unexpected and very unwelcome reaction - blowback, in the form of negative seo, which has just introduced a huge new risk for web businesses, as well as corrupting the search for everyone.

Because of our penalty work, we have a unique view into the changes, as they happen, on the enforcement side of Google. Beginning in March 2012, we started seeing a change in the way that Google was penalizing sites. Up until that time, the primary penalty was a trademark suppression (harming your brand searches) which usually saw most of your ranks disappear past page 3-5.

But recently, the most common penalty has been one that granularly impacts very specific ranks. And very recently some sites are getting a warning in advance of of the penalty. It's very likely that this is the main off-site focus of the plan announced recently to address "over-optimization" in a big way. In...

Link Velocity: (noun) The speed at which a link seller runs away once you discover that your site is penalized because of his links

The Claim

Link velocity refers to the rate at which links are posted to your site. Proponents claim that altering this "link velocity" is harmful because Google can perceive the change as unnatural. If you think about this, you would only be concerned if your link building activity was genuinely unnatural and you needed a strategy to hide that fact.

To deal with this obvious problem the link velocity proponents attempt to obfuscate the issue with some misdirection and mumbo jumbo - pointing to other considerations like "link direction" or "intention" or "vectors" - nothing that real metrics can even begin to address.

Think Like Google

If you were Google, would you see the rate at which a site acquires links to be important to the relevance of the content? Of course not! Links to fantastic link bait appear...

by Bob Sakayama

14 April 2011

(This is the longer version of the presentation made at the London seminar. Ray Snoddy's article on the topic is posted here)

Example Of Widespread, Unrecognized Risk:

I realize that risks of a search engine penalty, or a Google penalty, is something that is not very well understood, even by the community of website businesses. So I'd like to start by demonstrating how this risk may be present for your enterprise very early in the process, long before any commerce even takes place on the new website.

Imagine this scenario:

Your enterprise has acquired the worldwide rights to market a hugely successful new product called Super Magic Widgets. This product has such incredible potential that the decision is made to create a separate internet business to directly market it, rather than distributing it through existing venues.

Of course, the very first action is to search for a suitable domain to...

12 August 2010 : Bob Sakayama

Every time the product line changes, in many cases every year, most businesses simply discard the old product pages and replace it with the new one. By "cleaning house" in this way, we keep the site neat and orderly - but should we rethink this process? Could there be some value in preserving the record of the product evolution as it changes over time? The answer to both questions is: absolutely!

Since you already know what this article is advocating from the titles, you probably wonder what good are those old product pages. You probably never thought it might actually be a candidate for link bait. But it is.

Who would want to link to your old product pages? Have you ever searched for an obsolete product and found it in an archive? If you're a fashion maven and like to compare old styles with new, you probably already link to the stores or manufacturers that keep active archives. The point is that archives of...

1 July 2010 : Bob Sakayama

There's a disturbance in the force. And it ain't welcome.

We noticed that a lot of our clients had huge changes occurring in the metrics on external links within Google Webmaster Tools.

Clearly some very large change just occurred in the way links are reported within WMT, and it's not for the better. It was never a robust area, and the links G indexed never came close to the actual numbers, but at least we had some granular information we could act on.

One of the compliance checks we always perform when checking sites for ranking issues is a link evaluation - something that relies on access to this data. It also used to be one way to gauge the effectiveness of any link building campaign, or social marketing efforts. And it's the only way to identify a link attack by a 3rd party - although G says it can't happen, we know otherwise. And now we just lost the only avenue for discovery.

By moving to this... stop: 997