Google Algorithms, Penalties and Negative SEO-Busters

At the recent SMX Advanced Conference held in Seattle, Matt Cutts, the chief in charge of web spam at Google had a number of interesting things to say about Google’s algorithm changes and alternative techniques being used to increase transparency in their actions against black hat SEO practices. Plans to offer a disavow link service for web masters was also spoken about, which had search marketers all ears.

Penalties

With Google changing its Panda – and subsequently Penguin – algorithms so frequently, people have been asking if the arctic mascots are representing actual penalties for websites. Google views a “penalty” as a manual action, in its drive to be more transparent about when they take more “personalised” action against specific sites.

Cutts also goes on to talk about how link buying and boilerplate tactics have been well targeted by Google algorithms, and how perpetrators need to realise that they are actually wasting money by engaging in these actions.

There was also discussion around the much talked about solutions to negative SEO that Google had somewhat avoided for awhile, although they have put in a reasonable amount of work to safeguard against it.

Negative SEO – Disavow-this!

Aside from general algorithm updates, there has been much concern about how to avoid the negative SEO problem. The proposed solution has been to disavow links. Why can’t Google detect when there are dubious links pointing to a site and inform the Webmaster? Or conversely, if a Webmaster detects a shady link pointing to the site, they should be able to report it, in which case Google should give them a gold star for their detective work.

Transparency

Every time a new algorithm is implemented it’s near impossible to notify the millions of site owners involved. What Google is now big on, is being open when manual action against a specific site has been taken, all in the name of transparency. Happy to make examples of companies, Google will leave them with a warning and light slap on the wrist, but if they don’t heed that warning they will find themselves expelled, or at least suspended from ranking highly.

Link Buyers Will Pay

As Google algorithms are always being improved, some of the tools they have built that pinpointed blog networks are also able to track down link buying. Although, in the past, companies buying links were confident that they were untraceable, Google are warning that it’s those selling the links that they should be worried about. Google is not getting less stringent on paid links; tools and algorithms are getting stronger by the day and unfortunately for black hats, this won’t end up mirroring a David and Goliath situation.

Cutts answered a question about being unable to remove bad links from a page and if this was the case should the page be torn down. The answer depended on the importance of the page; if unimportant then it’s not a bad ploy, otherwise one could document their efforts and forward it on to Google.

Conclusion

What we can take from these insights into Google’s harder side is that a lot of emphasis has been placed on transparency and taking manual action against specific sites. Transparency relating to Google algorithm updates has been reasonable, but now users are looking to the implementation of a disavow-this-link tool to protect themselves, which might just be a couple of months away– watch this space.