Google Deindexes Paid Blog Networks Used for SEO
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Google is now attacking a link building strategy that incorporates using paid blog networks where one writes one article then submits it to a service that posts that article with the embedded back links to hundreds or even thousands of sites in their proprietary blog network. Google admits most of their new penalties are using manual research and algorithm overrides in order to deindex or penalize sites using the service. Of course, they are deindexing the sites that sell such services.
Google is sending out warnings that go something like this:
Dear site owner or webmaster of YourAccusedSite.com,
We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
I think Google has a hard row to hoe in front of them with this Big Brother with a big stick assault on webmasters. It’s clear what they are doing is signing up for these services, then finding out where those sites are in the network, then with their trojan horse technique, they are deindexing those sites from a manually generated list. They are hoping that they only have to do this to a few sites, then others will stop the practice out of fear it will happen to them, thus creating an example of them and getting others to take down their sites. So the snowball effect will kill the practice and the industry.
The biggest flaw in this monopolistic Google attack is that all you have to do to destroy your competition is to submit an article to one of these blog networks containing back links to your competitor’s site and viola your competitor is penalized or deindexed without doing anything against Google’s policies. Therefore, I think there is going to be a backlash for Google’s reckless deindexing of people’s sites.
Google penalizes you for doing exactly what they do; in fact they are hurting you for emulating their business model. Google survives on their paid back links network called Google AdWords, so Google is hypocritical trying to hurt the little guy while doing the exact same thing they are accusing others for. Google is notorious for surrounding organic search with their paid links network. They even try to make the paid AdWords links appear like part of the regular organic search by putting those paid links at the top of the page in line with the natural search below it. This wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t a monopoly, but I get 95% of my search traffic from Google. This makes me want to fan the flame to any alternative sources of traffic like other search engines and social media.
Even though Google makes subtle changes in their paid search links above the natural search, many of my clients are fooled by them thinking those ads are part of the natural search. Even though I have gotten their site to posistion one on page one, the client still points out that Google’s paid links network is outranking their number one spot.
Google has been caught buying paid links to artificially boost their own websites in a Google search. Then, to add salt in the wound, they said they would penalize the rogue group at Google for doing so, but the self-imposed penalty only lasted for a brief 60 days.
Other invasions of privacy are standard practice for Google even though they are in violation of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they don’t care, for them they use those sacred documents for toilet paper. In fact they’ve submitted a patent to secretly listen to all your cell phone calls to learn your likes and dislikes to target you for ads for even more profits. This is clearly a violation of many laws, but what does Google care, privacy is a joke at Google. Their closeness to American Intelligence agencies are alarming as well. God only knows how much information they sell to the government. This revolving door relationship may be the reason Google is able to skate the law.
Big G can throw billions of dollars into their legal department to insure their violations can proliferate without restraint. Even Congress and the governments of other countries were appalled when it was revealed that Google was going around the world collecting personal data from your wi-fi signal at your house. When caught, they said it was an accident…sure.
For a long time Google ran ads across the bottom of copyrighted music videos and movies to make a profit off of other people’s’ talent without paying them a dime in royalties on their YouTube site.
Google lost a lawsuit in France for hurting a business for artificially boosting sites that called their company a scam in the Google search results. As an online reputation manager, I’ve been very concerned with Google manipulating their search results and hurting innocent companies in the fray.
Google tracks your searches even when you leave Google sites and they save that history which can be used against you in court. Some people refer to this as the Google Supercookie. In fact, the previous CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, admits it in a CNBC interview and says you should never search for anything that might cause a red flag. Of course the excuse to invade your privacy is coupled with the trite phrase, ‘what difference does it make if you have nothing to hide’, but who is Google to decide when they violate everything they condemn their users for?
Here is the previous CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, warning people that they save everything you do and are willing to share that information with the government because of the Patriot Act:
Americans think the Patriot Act was written as a result of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, but it was authored in 1995 with Vice President Joe Biden as the lead organizer. It was locked and loaded and the politicians were anxiously waiting for an excuse to unleash this unconstitutional law. The Patriot Act was written for American citizens and terrorism was just the excuse they were waiting for. Americans chose safety over privacy because the voters have become apathetic and no longer value their freedom like they once did.
London-based Privacy International gave Google their lowest rating of any company they have ever evaluated:
I think in the end, Google will back off hurting sites that they allege use paid blog networks for link building because it’s too easy to destroy your competition beyond their control by using blog networks to build links to your competitor’s sites. After this rash practice developes enough backlash, they will only penalize or deindex the sites selling those services.
On a good note, Google has revealed that they have a weakness in their algorithm that can’t automatically detect and filter links in a blog network without sending an employee in to manually pick apart these networks. Secondly, they revealed that they consider these links powerful enough in SEO optimization to go after them in this unprecedented way, so links integrated into ample content are likely very powerful to boost the ranking of a site that one links to. It may serve you well to create your own private blog network since they’ve made it obvious that those links are valuable for SEO.
After posting this article on my blog, I noticed a lot of people are finding it by performing a search that asks, ‘does it hurt your site if you link to a deindexed site.’ In the past, you could never be penalized by links you can’t control like off site links pointing to your site, but it’s always been part of the algorithm to be filtered for linking to sites like link farms from your site to theirs, so yes, I think you could potentially be penalized for linking to sites that Google says is against their terms of service. The reason Google has created this possible penalty is that you are in complete control of what you link to from your site, but not sites that link to you. This is yet another example of how they’ve violated their own policy. I do not know how far they will push this new attack as it goes against everything they’ve ever promoted about search and SEO. They are now throwing out the baby with the bath water and discrediting their company. Google constantly violates policies they imprison their users with because they have taken the stance of a malevolent dictator. They justify their hypocrisy knowing they have a monopoly on search and that is serves people well when they can return results that help them find what you are looking for efficiently. It’s clear they believe in the Machiavellian principle that the end justifies the means.
Google Monopoly
Google is now attacking a link building strategy that incorporates using paid blog networks where one writes one article then submits it to a service that posts that article with the embedded back links to hundreds or even thousands of sites in their proprietary blog network. Google admits most of their new penalties are using manual research and algorithm overrides in order to deindex or penalize sites using the service. Of course, they are deindexing the sites that sell such services.
Google is sending out warnings that go something like this:
Dear site owner or webmaster of YourAccusedSite.com,
We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
I think Google has a hard row to hoe in front of them with this Big Brother with a big stick assault on webmasters. It’s clear what they are doing is signing up for these services, then finding out where those sites are in the network, then with their trojan horse technique, they are deindexing those sites from a manually generated list. They are hoping that they only have to do this to a few sites, then others will stop the practice out of fear it will happen to them, thus creating an example of them and getting others to take down their sites. So the snowball effect will kill the practice and the industry.
The biggest flaw in this monopolistic Google attack is that all you have to do to destroy your competition is to submit an article to one of these blog networks containing back links to your competitor’s site and viola your competitor is penalized or deindexed without doing anything against Google’s policies. Therefore, I think there is going to be a backlash for Google’s reckless deindexing of people’s sites.
Google penalizes you for doing exactly what they do; in fact they are hurting you for emulating their business model. Google survives on their paid back links network called Google AdWords, so Google is hypocritical trying to hurt the little guy while doing the exact same thing they are accusing others for. Google is notorious for surrounding organic search with their paid links network. They even try to make the paid AdWords links appear like part of the regular organic search by putting those paid links at the top of the page in line with the natural search below it. This wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t a monopoly, but I get 95% of my search traffic from Google. This makes me want to fan the flame to any alternative sources of traffic like other search engines and social media.
Even though Google makes subtle changes in their paid search links above the natural search, many of my clients are fooled by them thinking those ads are part of the natural search. Even though I have gotten their site to posistion one on page one, the client still points out that Google’s paid links network is outranking their number one spot.
Google has been caught buying paid links to artificially boost their own websites in a Google search. Then, to add salt in the wound, they said they would penalize the rogue group at Google for doing so, but the self-imposed penalty only lasted for a brief 60 days.
Other invasions of privacy are standard practice for Google even though they are in violation of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they don’t care, for them they use those sacred documents for toilet paper. In fact they’ve submitted a patent to secretly listen to all your cell phone calls to learn your likes and dislikes to target you for ads for even more profits. This is clearly a violation of many laws, but what does Google care, privacy is a joke at Google. Their closeness to American Intelligence agencies are alarming as well. God only knows how much information they sell to the government. This revolving door relationship may be the reason Google is able to skate the law.
Big G can throw billions of dollars into their legal department to insure their violations can proliferate without restraint. Even Congress and the governments of other countries were appalled when it was revealed that Google was going around the world collecting personal data from your wi-fi signal at your house. When caught, they said it was an accident…sure.
For a long time Google ran ads across the bottom of copyrighted music videos and movies to make a profit off of other people’s’ talent without paying them a dime in royalties on their YouTube site.
Google lost a lawsuit in France for hurting a business for artificially boosting sites that called their company a scam in the Google search results. As an online reputation manager, I’ve been very concerned with Google manipulating their search results and hurting innocent companies in the fray.
Google tracks your searches even when you leave Google sites and they save that history which can be used against you in court. Some people refer to this as the Google Supercookie. In fact, the previous CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, admits it in a CNBC interview and says you should never search for anything that might cause a red flag. Of course the excuse to invade your privacy is coupled with the trite phrase, ‘what difference does it make if you have nothing to hide’, but who is Google to decide when they violate everything they condemn their users for?
Here is the previous CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, warning people that they save everything you do and are willing to share that information with the government because of the Patriot Act:
Americans think the Patriot Act was written as a result of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, but it was authored in 1995 with Vice President Joe Biden as the lead organizer. It was locked and loaded and the politicians were anxiously waiting for an excuse to unleash this unconstitutional law. The Patriot Act was written for American citizens and terrorism was just the excuse they were waiting for. Americans chose safety over privacy because the voters have become apathetic and no longer value their freedom like they once did.
London-based Privacy International gave Google their lowest rating of any company they have ever evaluated:
I think in the end, Google will back off hurting sites that they allege use paid blog networks for link building because it’s too easy to destroy your competition beyond their control by using blog networks to build links to your competitor’s sites. After this rash practice developes enough backlash, they will only penalize or deindex the sites selling those services.
On a good note, Google has revealed that they have a weakness in their algorithm that can’t automatically detect and filter links in a blog network without sending an employee in to manually pick apart these networks. Secondly, they revealed that they consider these links powerful enough in SEO optimization to go after them in this unprecedented way, so links integrated into ample content are likely very powerful to boost the ranking of a site that one links to. It may serve you well to create your own private blog network since they’ve made it obvious that those links are valuable for SEO.
After posting this article on my blog, I noticed a lot of people are finding it by performing a search that asks, ‘does it hurt your site if you link to a deindexed site.’ In the past, you could never be penalized by links you can’t control like off site links pointing to your site, but it’s always been part of the algorithm to be filtered for linking to sites like link farms from your site to theirs, so yes, I think you could potentially be penalized for linking to sites that Google says is against their terms of service. The reason Google has created this possible penalty is that you are in complete control of what you link to from your site, but not sites that link to you. This is yet another example of how they’ve violated their own policy. I do not know how far they will push this new attack as it goes against everything they’ve ever promoted about search and SEO. They are now throwing out the baby with the bath water and discrediting their company. Google constantly violates policies they imprison their users with because they have taken the stance of a malevolent dictator. They justify their hypocrisy knowing they have a monopoly on search and that is serves people well when they can return results that help them find what you are looking for efficiently. It’s clear they believe in the Machiavellian principle that the end justifies the means.
Google has become an illegal monopoly in market share and now with the obvious telltale of all, they are taking their domination in the marketplace and using their power to destroy competitor’s businesses. The only paid links they want you to buy are theirs and now they are deliberately destroying people’s livelihood that own blog networks by deindexing them and killing their search traffic for doing the same thing they do. They do it under the guise of advertising, but either way, they control the traffic and give it to whoever they want and on the flip side, they take it away to boost their own profits. Just ask the owners of BuildMyRank.com, SEO Link Monster, SEO Nitro because Google destroyed their business by deindexing their sites. Their businesses were destroyed overnight. Google even demands that they confess their sins to Google in a letter exactly like the Catholic church does in confession before you can be forgiven by the Google God. Google is a jealous God that will spend billions to kill other competitors. Can you say Congressional hearings? Can you say multibillion dollar class action lawsuit?
Google has exposed themselves to even more legal action by creating a system where you can obey the Google Bible Commandments to the letter, then have a competitor build links from one of Google’s forbidden sites and get them deindexed. So the innocent are screwed and Google’s stand is that it’s just necessary collateral damage for the greater good.
All the above is my opinion and I’ve never been a fan of paid blog networks for SEO. I have been aggressive in explaining the negatives of Google because they never stop trying to lord their monopoly over us all for control and profit. Google has become the central nerve system for a Big Brother Orwellian nightmare.