It is easy to assume that Google only penalizes small websites. You
know the type: a website with nothing but plagiarized content and
affiliate links. In reality, however, Google has been known to target
even large well-known companies and websites and take them down a notch.
The large price tags on their luxury vehicles could not save BMW from Google’s wrath when the company’s German website (BMW.de) was found to be guilty of having hidden text and doorway sites filled with keywords in an effort to drive traffic. Google took little time penalizing BMW, deindexing the website within a day of finding out what the developers were attempting to do.
Imagine their surprise when they woke up to find their high-profile website with a Google PageRank of 0. After BMW corrected the problem, Google was just as quick to reinstate its indexed pages.
In 2008, Newsday.com watched its PageRank slip from 8 to 5 after the search giant accused it of selling links that pass PageRank. Google has made it clear that any websites that “buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings” will lose credibility in its search engine rankings.
Google suggests that paid links on a site should be disclosed with a rel="nofollow" attribute in the link tag or redirect the link through the robots.txt file. Like the BMW incident, Newsday’s PageRank quickly returned to 8 after the scandal made headlines.
What could a department store possibly do to upset Google? Apparently, it can do plenty. JC Penney apparently used notorious “Black Hat” SEO techniques to generate link farms that boosted its product pages to the top of search engine results in several categories.
It was the holiday shopping season of 2010, and JC Penney hired an SEO consultant to boost sales. While its initial intentions may have been pure enough, the method did not amuse Google, which punished JC Penny by dropping its product pages down at least a hundred spots in search engine results into relative obscurity.
In early 2011, Overstock.com was on cloud nine with amazing search engine rankings. Was it because its products magically improved? Was it because its “O” logo resembled Oprah’s logo? No, it was because the company decided to give discounts to college students who linked to its site from .edu domains.
Overstock claimed it was just a innocent advertising ploy to encourage college students to shop on its site, but Google did not buy it. After all, the company encouraged students to link very specific key words like “bunk beds” and “gift baskets” to Overstock pages. Furthermore, Google’s algorithm specifically trusts .edu domains more than others because of the whole “academic” credential thing. When Overstock’s promotion ended, many of those paid links remained. In response, Google Dropped Overstock to the fifth and sixth pages of search results.
Google’s recent algorithm update, “Panda 2.0”, introduced new standards for content. No longer would sites with loads of low-quality, even nonsensical content be rewarded for junking up the web. Many web users know them as “content farms”, and many freelance writers churn out cheap $10 and $15 articles for them at alarming rates during these tough economic times.
EzineArticles.com is just one of many content farms that are now feeling the effects of Google’s plans to demote them from content supremacy. Simply having a lot of content is no longer enough. Some companies like Demand Studios (publishers of ehow.com and others) have been rather vocal about their efforts to improve content quality and dissociate themselves with the word “content farm”, but that will take a tremendous overall of current content to have any effect.
1. BMW
The large price tags on their luxury vehicles could not save BMW from Google’s wrath when the company’s German website (BMW.de) was found to be guilty of having hidden text and doorway sites filled with keywords in an effort to drive traffic. Google took little time penalizing BMW, deindexing the website within a day of finding out what the developers were attempting to do.
Imagine their surprise when they woke up to find their high-profile website with a Google PageRank of 0. After BMW corrected the problem, Google was just as quick to reinstate its indexed pages.
2. Newsday.com
In 2008, Newsday.com watched its PageRank slip from 8 to 5 after the search giant accused it of selling links that pass PageRank. Google has made it clear that any websites that “buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings” will lose credibility in its search engine rankings.
Google suggests that paid links on a site should be disclosed with a rel="nofollow" attribute in the link tag or redirect the link through the robots.txt file. Like the BMW incident, Newsday’s PageRank quickly returned to 8 after the scandal made headlines.
3. JC Penney
What could a department store possibly do to upset Google? Apparently, it can do plenty. JC Penney apparently used notorious “Black Hat” SEO techniques to generate link farms that boosted its product pages to the top of search engine results in several categories.
It was the holiday shopping season of 2010, and JC Penney hired an SEO consultant to boost sales. While its initial intentions may have been pure enough, the method did not amuse Google, which punished JC Penny by dropping its product pages down at least a hundred spots in search engine results into relative obscurity.
4. Overstock
In early 2011, Overstock.com was on cloud nine with amazing search engine rankings. Was it because its products magically improved? Was it because its “O” logo resembled Oprah’s logo? No, it was because the company decided to give discounts to college students who linked to its site from .edu domains.
Overstock claimed it was just a innocent advertising ploy to encourage college students to shop on its site, but Google did not buy it. After all, the company encouraged students to link very specific key words like “bunk beds” and “gift baskets” to Overstock pages. Furthermore, Google’s algorithm specifically trusts .edu domains more than others because of the whole “academic” credential thing. When Overstock’s promotion ended, many of those paid links remained. In response, Google Dropped Overstock to the fifth and sixth pages of search results.
5. Ezinearticles.com
Google’s recent algorithm update, “Panda 2.0”, introduced new standards for content. No longer would sites with loads of low-quality, even nonsensical content be rewarded for junking up the web. Many web users know them as “content farms”, and many freelance writers churn out cheap $10 and $15 articles for them at alarming rates during these tough economic times.
EzineArticles.com is just one of many content farms that are now feeling the effects of Google’s plans to demote them from content supremacy. Simply having a lot of content is no longer enough. Some companies like Demand Studios (publishers of ehow.com and others) have been rather vocal about their efforts to improve content quality and dissociate themselves with the word “content farm”, but that will take a tremendous overall of current content to have any effect.
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