6 ms·

You seem to have a lot of experience with this kind of stuff. Could you possibly give me a tldr on this story? I recall the exposé talking about how they were

by phillmv 13y ago

You seem to have a lot of experience with this kind of stuff. Could you possibly give me a tldr on this story? I recall the exposé talking about how they were trading twitter links for keyword link building. Yet I'm having a hard time working up the requisite outrage. It's not spam - the people linking back aren't being coerced (i.e. spam comments), and the content it's being linked from is legit (i.e. not a crappy link-farm site void of content). Is the reason that this is Bad(tm) because the link back is not "organic"? It strikes me as being identical to say, paying every a thousand bloggers writing about Bieber to link to RG - except that last example is impossible to detect. They exchanged a small ad for twitter inbound traffic. Is there just a blanket ban on trying to divine how the algorithm works? It's a commonly accepted practice to pay other people to promote or write about your product/service/brand.

itsprofitbaron 13y ago
Essentially Rap Genius violated one of Google's Webmaster Guidelines[1] by attempting to manipulate the SERPs through getting webmasters to link to several lyrics pages in exchange for a tweet. In doing so, Google considers this as link scheme[2] which is trying to manipulate the results specifically in relation to Buying/Selling Links: Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link There are several other ways to "manipulate" the SERPs this way including some of them which you have identified such as - spam comments, doorway pages, forum profiles amongst others - and Google has an algorithm codenamed Penguin which, detects and penalises webmasters who attempt to manipulate the search engines in such way (although it is more complicated than this). However, Penguin is not the only way which Google identifies people being involved in these practices as they also have a place to report the links[3]. This is one of Google's Manual Actions[4] that webmasters receive, when Google believes you are not providing the user with additional value and/or are trying to manipulate the results. They cover everything from Thin Content (mainly through Panda) to Hacked Sites to User Generated Spam to the recent Image Mismatch Penalty etc. You can see them all here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/2604771?hl=en&ref_topic=2371401 https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/2604771?hl=en&re... [1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769 [2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356 [3] https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1&hl=en https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1&hl=e... [4] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824?hl=en
- usaphp 13y ago
  > ...by attempting to manipulate the SERPs through getting webmasters to link to several lyrics pages in exchange for a tweet. How is that different from paying bloggers to write a product review with a link to a product? Why is not that considered a "manipulation of SERPs" - you exchange (money/tweet) for a link.
  - itsprofitbaron 13y ago
    It's not different. As mentioned earlier, paying for links is against one of Google's Webmaster Guidelines[1] and your example specifically falls under the Link Scheme[2] category which is affecting Rap Genius. Those types of links reviews for a link, are considered advertorials which Interflora were "famously" penalised[3] for and something Google specifically identifies within their Link Scheme examples[2] [1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769 [2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356 [3] http://searchengineland.com/google-says-no-comment-on-why-interflora-was-penalized-149308 http://searchengineland.com/google-says-no-comment-on-why-in...
    - phillmv 13y ago
      Wait. I was about to ask if the lesson to draw here was to make it look organic. But mostly serious question here: how does TechCrunch have any Google rank then? How do most tech publications, for that matter? PR hits are extremely common; they're the name of the game when it comes to cheap content. It's okay if it looks like it's mutual self interest, and not if it overtly competes with Google's advertising platform?
      - itsprofitbaron 13y ago
        how does TechCrunch have any Google rank then? How do most tech publications, for that matter? TechCrunch does not post advertorials, they post content for free and they actually posted on their site to reaffirm this fact[1]. Sure there may be some PR firms etc who might get paid to get that content on to TechCrunch or another tech publications but TechCrunch writers are not directly compensated for doing so. As a result the content they write from a startup launch to a new feature etc is considered "natural" by the search engines as they're choosing to write about it. Moreover, those publications get the majority of their search engine traffic through being in Google News ala. posting about "Twitter" and getting inserted into the "Twitter" SERPs within the "News" section. Additionally they also leverage internal linking to boost their SERPs potential e.g. whenever they talk about Zulily (they're in #9 for me in Incognito mode although they might be higher/ on Page 2 for you) instead of linking to the site they'll reference the "Tag URL"[2] as well as referencing Crunchbase[3] (although CrunchBase isn't really 'internal' as its an external site). Likewise, Google loves "fresh content" so they will naturally be inserted with little/no links within the top 7ish results for something generic (although this does not always happen) such as "credit card numbers" when they do a post about "credit card numbers" and will naturally lose search engine positioning for that term over time. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/08/we-are-worth-at-least-3k/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/08/we-are-worth-at-least-3k/ [2] http://techcrunch.com/tag/zulily/ http://techcrunch.com/tag/zulily/ [3] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zulily http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zulily
rsync 13y ago
"You seem to have a lot of experience with this kind of stuff." Which is sad. SEO is a cancer and, like cancer, there is no good SEO. Google and their broken search ecosystem have spawned a vast, useless, derivative "industry" that needs to die. I say "broken ecosystem" because SEO should have a value that is inverse to how well google indexes. That SEO exists at all shows the extent to which it is broken. Website death penalties (or whatever we call this) don't solve the problem.
- mspeuleski 13y ago
  Google practices the exact same dirty tactics it punishes smaller websites for. Note how they have a lot of ads all over their pages? If small websites do that, they get punished. Also, note how Google steals content from wikipedia and posts it next to search results? If small sites do that they get punished. Lastly, google is the world's largest reseller of links, except their links are "ok", for some obscure reason....you can pay google a large sum of money and see your link on billions of pages worldwide via link ads. If you're not scared of google's double talk, blatant spying, abuse of monopolistic powers, then you either work for them or you are completely alienated.
- vidyesh 13y ago
  You are somewhat right and somewhat wrong. SEO indeed is like what you described, but there is a fine line to start doing blackhat or stay whitehat. Now the problem is, the line is so thin you end up crossing it at times. And everybody does. The way Google works you need to do both somewhat in a way to get the balance and stay top. For example, link-building its one of the worst areas where defining white-hat and black-hat is really difficult. One way is doing guest post is allowed and great but paid posts aren't. There is no guarantee a guest post is not a paid post. There are 'digital marketing agencies' which at times are so ridiculous that the backlink included in the guest post doesn't have any value in to the post as such but anchor text magic does all the work. SEO isn't broken as such but there are too many backdoors to doing the white-hat SEO methods in the concealed black-hat way that it isn't realistic to blame he search ecosystem. I agree, website penalties is not a good solution to the problem.
- blauwbilgorgel 13y ago

by phillmv 13y ago

itsprofitbaron 13y ago

Essentially Rap Genius violated one of Google's Webmaster Guidelines[1] by attempting to manipulate the SERPs through getting webmasters to link to several lyrics pages in exchange for a tweet. In doing so, Google considers this as link scheme[2] which is trying to manipulate the results specifically in relation to Buying/Selling Links: Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link There are several other ways to "manipulate" the SERPs this way including some of them which you have identified such as - spam comments, doorway pages, forum profiles amongst others - and Google has an algorithm codenamed Penguin which, detects and penalises webmasters who attempt to manipulate the search engines in such way (although it is more complicated than this). However, Penguin is not the only way which Google identifies people being involved in these practices as they also have a place to report the links[3]. This is one of Google's Manual Actions[4] that webmasters receive, when Google believes you are not providing the user with additional value and/or are trying to manipulate the results. They cover everything from Thin Content (mainly through Panda) to Hacked Sites to User Generated Spam to the recent Image Mismatch Penalty etc. You can see them all here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/2604771?hl=en&ref_topic=2371401 https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/2604771?hl=en&re... [1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769 [2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356 [3] https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1&hl=en https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1&hl=e... [4] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824?hl=en

usaphp 13y ago
> ...by attempting to manipulate the SERPs through getting webmasters to link to several lyrics pages in exchange for a tweet. How is that different from paying bloggers to write a product review with a link to a product? Why is not that considered a "manipulation of SERPs" - you exchange (money/tweet) for a link.
- itsprofitbaron 13y ago
  It's not different. As mentioned earlier, paying for links is against one of Google's Webmaster Guidelines[1] and your example specifically falls under the Link Scheme[2] category which is affecting Rap Genius. Those types of links reviews for a link, are considered advertorials which Interflora were "famously" penalised[3] for and something Google specifically identifies within their Link Scheme examples[2] [1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769 [2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356 [3] http://searchengineland.com/google-says-no-comment-on-why-interflora-was-penalized-149308 http://searchengineland.com/google-says-no-comment-on-why-in...
  - phillmv 13y ago
    Wait. I was about to ask if the lesson to draw here was to make it look organic. But mostly serious question here: how does TechCrunch have any Google rank then? How do most tech publications, for that matter? PR hits are extremely common; they're the name of the game when it comes to cheap content. It's okay if it looks like it's mutual self interest, and not if it overtly competes with Google's advertising platform?
    - itsprofitbaron 13y ago
      how does TechCrunch have any Google rank then? How do most tech publications, for that matter? TechCrunch does not post advertorials, they post content for free and they actually posted on their site to reaffirm this fact[1]. Sure there may be some PR firms etc who might get paid to get that content on to TechCrunch or another tech publications but TechCrunch writers are not directly compensated for doing so. As a result the content they write from a startup launch to a new feature etc is considered "natural" by the search engines as they're choosing to write about it. Moreover, those publications get the majority of their search engine traffic through being in Google News ala. posting about "Twitter" and getting inserted into the "Twitter" SERPs within the "News" section. Additionally they also leverage internal linking to boost their SERPs potential e.g. whenever they talk about Zulily (they're in #9 for me in Incognito mode although they might be higher/ on Page 2 for you) instead of linking to the site they'll reference the "Tag URL"[2] as well as referencing Crunchbase[3] (although CrunchBase isn't really 'internal' as its an external site). Likewise, Google loves "fresh content" so they will naturally be inserted with little/no links within the top 7ish results for something generic (although this does not always happen) such as "credit card numbers" when they do a post about "credit card numbers" and will naturally lose search engine positioning for that term over time. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/08/we-are-worth-at-least-3k/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/08/we-are-worth-at-least-3k/ [2] http://techcrunch.com/tag/zulily/ http://techcrunch.com/tag/zulily/ [3] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zulily http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zulily

rsync 13y ago

"You seem to have a lot of experience with this kind of stuff." Which is sad. SEO is a cancer and, like cancer, there is no good SEO. Google and their broken search ecosystem have spawned a vast, useless, derivative "industry" that needs to die. I say "broken ecosystem" because SEO should have a value that is inverse to how well google indexes. That SEO exists at all shows the extent to which it is broken. Website death penalties (or whatever we call this) don't solve the problem.

mspeuleski 13y ago
Google practices the exact same dirty tactics it punishes smaller websites for. Note how they have a lot of ads all over their pages? If small websites do that, they get punished. Also, note how Google steals content from wikipedia and posts it next to search results? If small sites do that they get punished. Lastly, google is the world's largest reseller of links, except their links are "ok", for some obscure reason....you can pay google a large sum of money and see your link on billions of pages worldwide via link ads. If you're not scared of google's double talk, blatant spying, abuse of monopolistic powers, then you either work for them or you are completely alienated.
vidyesh 13y ago
You are somewhat right and somewhat wrong. SEO indeed is like what you described, but there is a fine line to start doing blackhat or stay whitehat. Now the problem is, the line is so thin you end up crossing it at times. And everybody does. The way Google works you need to do both somewhat in a way to get the balance and stay top. For example, link-building its one of the worst areas where defining white-hat and black-hat is really difficult. One way is doing guest post is allowed and great but paid posts aren't. There is no guarantee a guest post is not a paid post. There are 'digital marketing agencies' which at times are so ridiculous that the backlink included in the guest post doesn't have any value in to the post as such but anchor text magic does all the work. SEO isn't broken as such but there are too many backdoors to doing the white-hat SEO methods in the concealed black-hat way that it isn't realistic to blame he search ecosystem. I agree, website penalties is not a good solution to the problem.
blauwbilgorgel 13y ago