We Do Search Engine Optimization.

The popular Long Island New York newspaper Newsday was penalized by Google for selling text links that pass pagerank.

Here is a screenshot of the crazy amount of nofollow tags used by Newsday.com

There are nearly 100 no followed links, but it’s quite curious to see which links are still passing PR. Semi related links to small local destination sites are still getting a link boost from this PageRank 8 site including a wedding, travel, health and shopping site.

Links that are directly related to this large print publication including the LA Times, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel and other huge newspapers are nofollowed.

The archive shows a section labeled ‘ Featured Links’ which carry sites such as :

• Mesothelioma Lawyer Lung Cancer
• Personal Injury Law Firm
• Buy Mets Tickets
• Buy Yankees Tickets
• Wicked Tickets
• Hamptons Travel

So Newsday.com can boost its fledgling sites while trying to negate the association of major newspapers, and the Hamptons Travel site is still linking with full credit. Hey newsday, i’ll sell you one of my content sites so your PR8 site can link to it and we can dominate the SERP’s.

Google has always been inconsistent in dealing with link sellers. There seems to be no complete method to find out which sites will receive a penalty for selling links that pass page rank. Google has not algorithmically solved the problem of link brokering and must rely on a semi accurate computer model with heavy human intervention.

Loren, WPN, Barry posted about this interesting case.

*update*

The SEO Manager, who was hired after the link selling program was implemented, posted a request in Google Groups and apparently got the problem resolved within 1 week. Newsday.com instantly jumped from a toolbar PR 5 to 8.

Google Engineer Reid

Thanks for your post. I’m glad you’re posting here in the Webmaster
Help Group, because the discussions here help educate webmasters
around the globe. I just checked over newsday.com and compared it to
the most recent version of newsday.com that was indexed by
Archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070829225145/http://www.newsday.com/

Scrolling near the bottom of what your site used to look like, I see
the following “Featured Links”:
Mesothelioma Lawyer Lung Cancer Personal Injury Law Firm
Buy Mets Tickets Buy Yankees Tickets Wicked Tickets
Hamptons Travel

Please remember that participating in link schemes intended to
manipulate search engine rankings, including buying or selling links
that pass PageRank, is a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, and
may impact your site’s standing in Google:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356

If you believe your site was at one point in violation of the
Webmaster Guidelines, and you have since made changes to your site so
that it fits within the guidelines, you can request reconsideration of
your site by following the steps here:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843

Hitwise has released a blog post detailing the consequences of a google blacklist. The UK car insurance site gocompare.com was

Chart showing the demise of gocompare after it lost the #1 position for its top performing keyword in the UK search engine results pages

At this point I have no clear evidence of gocompares sins, but they appear to have been purchasing copious links. View backlinks in Yahoo.

I’m not sure what GoCompare did to spite the google gods, but they gave their competitors an early christmas gift. Other websites in the same sector saw mammoth traffic increases.

GoCompare received only 2.31% of all search term traffic from the term ‘car insurance’ during the week ending 9th February, which is an 87% decrease from week ending 26th Jan when it held the #1 natural position on Google… searches for ‘car insurance’ remained constant during this period.

Traffic from the term to Confused.com (direct competitor) has increased by 77% since the 26th January, while traffic to Comparethemarket.com has tripled over the same period.

At the end of January 2008 GoCompare was the number one site receiving traffic from the term ‘car insurance’, capturing 17.49% of the all search traffic from the term, even more than the branded term ‘go compare’.

chart displaying UK marketshare for car insurance

Read more of the hitwise case study of search engine optimization gone bad and how a Google penalty can sink an unprepared company.

Serious controversy in SEO land. Google is handing out manual penalties by the truckload, and fellow SEO’s are steamed. SEO’s are like soldiers on the front line, we always get hit first and take unrelenting punishment for pushing the line forward.

Ok Google, we understand that you hate paid links and have waged a battle against text link ads and now paid reviews. The problem that the search engine optimization field has is the unfairness with which we are treated – there definitely is a double standard as we are the most visible crowd online.

Some people go way over the line and spam by placing sitewide footer links, paid links with a greater than 15% ratio, 50% sponsored posts, or scraped duplicate content. The SEO field has savvy users, and people know (even if they refuse to admin) if they are whit, gray or black hat optimizers. Don’t throw the white hats and into the same ditch as the cloaking and spamming crowd, I promise we want to work with you, not against you.

Michael asks the question

Matt, why is this? What is it about these people that you interact with on a regular basis that leads you to trust the decision making process of anonymous Yahoo employees over theirs?

As much as I hate to admit it, a Yahoo directory editor is an unbiased reviewer, and likely has a good understanding of quality websites. Also, they have no personal financial interest in the decision, other than they want to perform well so they can keep their job.

Also, kudos to matt cutts for expressing sincere concern and helping individuals who have been penalized. I have worked with people who were in the Google penalty box and it is not a pleasant situation.

The bottom line is that if SEO’s are going to be held to stricter editorial standards, we need a better line of communication with the Google webspam team and reinclusion team.

I don’t really consider this a war unlike some people but all I ask is for a better way than shooting first and making bloggers come begging for mercy.