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:
- Links intended to manipulate PageRank
- Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
- Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
- 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.
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