Lately there have been a few articles in the news about how Google has punished sites for using what they consider Black Hat SEO tricks.  The biggest names so far have been JC Penny and Overstock. Google tells companies to follow their Webmaster Guidelines and specifically read their definition of what constitutes a link scheme.  From Google’s Link Scheme page, if your link building campaign does one of these you are creating a link scheme:

1. Links intended to manipulate PageRank
2. Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
3. Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
4. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

JC Penny paid for their links

The reason why JC Penny got into trouble with Google was because they paid a Black Hat SEO company to create thousands of links for thousands of keywords across the net.  Doing this is a blatant link scheme because it follows rules #1 and #4 of what constitutes a Link Scheme.  This was an obvious mistake on JC Penny’s side and it something that will have to deal with.

Overstock gave coll kids discounts for links

Overstock got into hot water for an entirely different reason, they gave students discounts for posting links on their .edu domains to Overstock’s website.  This would seemingly only meet #4 of Google’s of what is a Link Scheme.

The Gray Zone

When you compare what JC Penny and Overstock did a huge difference emerges.  JC Penny had the intent of increasing their Page Rank through any means necessary.  Overstock found a way to leverage the internet community into increasing their Page Rank.  Overstock never paid anyone money to post these links.  They simply created an incentive for students to post links to them.  If Google was punishing them for attaching an incentive to creating links to their site then there are a great deal of companies that should also be penalized.  There are tens of thousands of companies who do this daily. Honest companies like Das Keyboard who enter you into prize drawings to write reviews or link to their products. This wouldn’t seem to be much different than what Overstock did, except Overstock did it on a larger scale and were more successful.

So that begs the question, does Google punish sites for being overly successful at SEO or for breaking the Webmaster Rules?  To me it seems like there is a real gray zone where Google is making their own decisions and punishing whoever they choose.  What concerns me is are they making decisions and taking action based off of bad press and trying to save face or in the interest of doing the right thing?  After all, Google found out about what JC Penny did from The Wall Street Journal and about Overstock from an SEO Forum.

One last thing: Maybe Overstock gamed the system or maybe they exposed a whole in Google’s Algorithm.  How can a handful of .edu links make such a huge difference?  There are literally thousands of .edu sites in the US and many of them have sections controlled and maintained by students.  Until Google makes a change to how strongly is weighs links for .edu’s we will continue to see people try and game .edu links.

I like many other web developers have been waiting for the end of IE6.  I find Internet Explorer 6 frustrating to work with and it differences with modern browsers is infuriating at times.  I have been watching quietly for the last year as the number of IE6 users has steadily dropped.  My opinion has been that once it falls below 1% I should be able to easily convince any company I work with that there is no need to test in IE6.  Below is a graph showing usage by month worldwide of the 3 most used versions of Internet Explorer.

Full Data at http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-201003-201102

I used this to find an average loss of IE6 users to be around 7.5%.  At that constant rate of loss less than 1% of browser in use will be IE6 in October of 2012.  So why will it be dead in 12 months?  I predict a number of things going into it.

1. People are moving to Firefox, Chrome, and Safari more rapidly as the network effect takes hold.
2. More major companies like Google will push people away from IE6 by putting notices on their site that their software is no longer 100% compatible with it.
3. While IE9 doesn’t have an official release date yet, if Microsoft wants to stay in the Browser game they need to release it before 2011 is over.  When IE9 comes out, a lot of people will switch.
4. As the number of IE6 users dwindle the pressure on the remaining users as resources become more and more focused on them.
5. When CTOs see what the browser landscape looks like at the end of 2011 and see that staying on IE6 is a technological death sentence, they will put the capital towards getting rid of it.  Right now corporations are the where almost all IE6 users are coming from in the US.

The holdouts in all of this will be old big corporations and countries trying to rapidly build their technology base as cheaply as possible.  The reasons for both are the same, the cost of upgrading is too prohibitive.  Even with these hold outs it will be a brave new world for most of us.  Microsoft even has a countdown website of sorts.  I look forward to the end of IE6 and I cannot wait to celebrate its demise!

One more prediction: Once IE6 disappears, IE7 will be the next target and should be see less that 1% market share by the end of 2012.  While IE7 isn’t as horrible as IE6, there are few business reasons to use it, IE8 more or less replicate it and Windows XP can upgrade all the way to IE8.