Major retailers penalized by Google… are you next?

Even if you’re not in the Internet marketing and SEO scene, you’ve probably heard through mainstream media that Google has went on a slapping spree on major websites a few weeks ago. The most notable of these are big retailers JC Penney and Overstock which saw rankings for their high-competition keywords drop from page 1 to pages 5-6. Both retailers acknowledged that they were hit by Google in a really bad way.

So what happened?

The two retailers have related but distinct cases. Let’s take the JC Penney incident first: This retailer’s website has pretty good authority and Google says its home page has a PageRank value of 5. That’s a nice amount of power and you can do quite a lot of things with that kind of ranking mojo. The site’s on-page SEO, however, is BRUTAL. JC Penney’s design violates conventional SEO wisdom with its reliance on image-based text than on actual bot-readable plain text. The site is also known for a less-than-stellar internal linking structure and its insistence on using non-text navigational links.

If that’s the case, why did JC Penney rank so well for its competitive keywords despite its flaws?

Apparently, the power of well-anchored paid links from relevant websites has a lot more impact than anyone thought. JC Penney had a lot of these links and a competitor grew suspicious and leaked this little secret to the New York Times. The NYT ran a story on it, throwing an egg on Google’s face for not catching the violations before the news organization did. The result? Google dropped the bomb on JC Penney in a late attempt to right what was wrong.

This begs the question of whether or not Google was purposely ignoring JC Penney’s violations of its guidelines. It must be pointed out that the retailer is one of Google’s big time advertisers, but hey, we’re not here to do conspiracy theories. The truth is out there (humming X-files theme).

Overstock’s slap episode is a little bit cuter than that of JC Penney. We don’t know if this retailer has been buying links but we do know that it offered university faculty and students nice discounts if they linked to Overstock.com in their school’s website forums using words like “vacuum cleaners” and “laptop computers.” As you know by now, .edu links carry strong Google juice, which propelled Overstock’s pages to the top of Google searches for a lot of keywords it targeted using this method. When you think about it, the strategy seems pretty clever, but Mother G begs to disagree.

I can see what Google’s stand is on this debacle. In essence, Overstock hired a lot of link builders/spammers to flood .edu domains with links to their site and compensated their unwitting subjects with discounts. Google probably saw this as a double-headed monster that sought to increase sales while enhancing Overstock’s SEO, prompting the search engine to put its foot down and send the retailer’s keyword rankings plummeting to the SERP nether regions.

Google also went on to penalize content “farms” Wisegeek, Hubpages and Associated Content which a lot of people regarded as high-quality sites with good information. Apparently, Google wasn’t so high on how they acquire and give out links. Those three along with a handful of others got the Big G’s Big Slap and the rest is history.

If you’ve seen your boss or colleagues freak out about this, you’re not alone. A lot of people who have done some SEO and link building on their websites have been fearing the worst. A couple of weeks after the slapping wave’s peak, most site owners I know have gotten away unscathed even if they did get their hands a little dirty with link building in the past.

My take on this whole matter is that the latest Google slaps and algorithm changes were mostly for big time offenders. Sites that have been buying links aggressively or spreading low-quality content like mushroom spores are the main targets. If you aren’t guilty of either, then there’s probably no reason to get worried. Most websites that didn’t have the budget and knowhow to purchase juicy links anyway and should be safe. If you haven’t been spamming link and article directories like mad, you’re probably better off not getting worked up about getting slapped sometime soon.

Matter of fact, there’s reason to think that there might not be a real algorithm change. The slaps could all be manual. This wave of slaps may just be Google’s elaborate PR move to get rid of the egg on its face after the New York Times “saw” JC Penney’s underhanded tactics “before” they did. Do note that this is just me reading between the lines and I don’t have any real evidence yet to support the theory.

Like that has EVER stopped me before!

Regardless of what changes in Google’s algorithm went down, the question a lot of people are asking right now is “what’s still considered good link building practice and what I can do to avoid slaps in the future?”

I believe these principles are the rules of thumb now and moving forward:

• Anything too much is bad – Seeing the negative effects that link buying can cause, should I advise you to avoid it like the Black Plague?

A better question would be “do you know the right way of buying links?”

I believe there’s always a right and wrong way of doing things. Link buying is against Google rules, no doubt, but a lot of people and websites have been able to supplement their natural link profiles with bought links without getting penalized. The key here, if you absolutely MUST buy links, is to not be too blatant about it.

Don’t go on a buying spree. Randomize the intervals of link acquisition. Don’t get all your links with the absolute same anchor text – have different variants of the anchor-linked keyword. Mix up the page ranks of the pages that you get links from and on top of all that, never let your competitor sense it by going out on a limb and trying to rank high for a lot of keywords in a short span of time. Last but not the least; don’t rely solely on bought links. Get some natural links that will balance out your link profile.

• Avoid bad link neighborhoods – If you’re receiving a lot of backlinks from porn, gambling, weapon or spam sites and their content has nothing to do with yours, this could be a cause for concern. Domains of this ilk are not considered very desirable for Google and it could lead to some penalties later on. Make sure that you have more links coming from relevant, high-quality sites than bad neighborhood sites. You can’t control who’s linking to you., but you can make efforts in keeping the bad stuff at bay by having more good links than crappy ones.
• Generate viral content – The best way to get good, relevant and FREE links is still by means of creating great content. Writing great articles, creating useful and entertaining videos, offering free downloads and other crowd-pleasers is still the best and fastest way to build links. This not only raises your Google ranking power, it also gives you genuine popularity in your niche’s community.
• Supply your niche with its information demands – If a pill that cures cancer was released today, can you imagine the tremendous rush for people to get it everywhere in the world? The easiest products to sell are the ones that provide a solution to an existing problem. That’s what you have to keep in mind if you want to be a market leader in your niche.

You don’t have to find a cure for cancer every day. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of taking a look at a niche and asking yourself what people are looking for. Alternatively, it could be a simple thought process of what’s not out there that people will like if someone finally provided it.

Care tips on a specific dog breed, an episode guide for a TV series, an aggregate of product reviews – these are kinds of information that a lot of people are looking for but are not able to find anywhere. It then becomes your choice if you want to cater to the market’s needs or not. Keep in mind that people flock to things that they have long been asking for. When they finally find it, they tend to talk about it. In the Internet, that talk translates into a lot of backlinks for your website, which helps it rise fast in the search rankings.

• Don’t think of everyone in the same niche as a competitor – A common mistake that I see in a lot of Internet marketers and SEO professionals is that they view everyone in the same industry that they’re in as hostile competitors. This isn’t necessarily the case and thinking this way can be counter-productive.

Sure, e-commerce sites will probably never be your sources of links, but there are plenty of bloggers and webmasters out there who maintain websites either for a hobby or as a supplementary source of income. Most of these people are eager to network and can become friendly with you. Sooner or later, you can find yourself guest-posting articles on their sites (with a backlink to yours, of course) and interacting with their audience.  This allows you to reach out to new people that have been previously unknown to you.

I know what you’re thinking – this begs the issue of reciprocal linking and you’re after one-way links. Relax. There’s a lot of ways to be friendly and to exchange content without having to link back to your friends. Talking about their site and promoting them in a video or a podcast is great and will surely be appreciated. Acknowledging them in whitepapers is also a good way of getting in their good graces. You see, you don’t have to barter links for links when you’ve got friends running other websites. You just have to be creative in how you offer value to them.

Well, there goes my two cents on Google’s latest wave of slaps. I guess our takeaway from all this is that as long as you don’t overdo the abuse of Google’s rules, you shouldn’t worry about getting thrown to the search engine gallows. A lot of the classic link building adages still work, so go out there and get yourself some.

Until then,

Andy “Don’t Slap Me” Jenkins

Tagged as: Google, google penalty, google slap, google slaps, how to avoid a google slap, information demands, link buying, SEO, viral content