NBC hit with Google Penalty
I have been eagerly waiting to out something like this since starting work with Bronco…
Today I have been researching new places to get authoritative links, we have a few locations which rock and are always trying to grow this out.. So as I browse over the weeks I take note of any potentials. Whilst browsing I noticed that nbc.com has a very very similar setup to another site we use for building authority and started to do some digging to see if it was viable to become a trusted member in this moderated community.
First thing to do is find the most authoritative pages on the site using a “site:” query. So I looked at the second result..
A load of spammed blog posts, the PageRank Toolbar is grayed out, completely and then before you know it… BAM! An embedded JavaScript Redirects me to this.
The whole of my.nbc.com is under a heavy penalty from Google because its been spammed to pieces. Of course this is happening to many sites including Bebo as seen here.
malcolm coles 1493 days ago
http://www.malcolmcoles.co.ukWhen you say “First thing to do is find the most authoritative pages on the site using a “site:” query. ” Is this what the order of a site: search is? It’s always looked a bit random when I checked it on my own site …
oggy 1493 days ago
http://www.aodmarketing.com@Malcolm You’re right! The order of results using the “Site:” query is totally random.
Amelia Vargo 1493 days ago
Just goes to show – even massive giants like nbc can be penalised by Google.
Chis 1492 days ago
Malcolm, there is a lot you can learn from the ‘site:’ query.
mark 1492 days ago
http://www.yellowzombie.co.ukinteresting find, I always thought the site: query was a bit random too.
just Guido 1492 days ago
http://www.justguido.comI tried a couple of queries for NBC news articles using the exact headlines. I can’t find them, even when I add ‘nbc’ to the query.
I guess the bigger the website, the harder it is to spot stuff like this. But how would a website owner notice the penalty. Is it just the fact that content doesn’t rank?
Could be hard to spot it in analytics, because of the vast amount of other traffic sources evening things out for a big website like NBC. Or would you see a distinct drop in keyword traffic?
Anything you can share on that? =)
Shark SEO 1492 days ago
http://sharkseo.comNice find Anthony.
Malcolm – The site: command is a bit random, but if you search site:yourdomain.com inurl:yourdomain.com it should order it with more relevance (although it’s still not spot on)
Try it with just site:.com – I’m seeing a load of random sites.
Now try site:.com inurl:.com – MSN, Amazon, Yahoo, CNET, Microsoft, Ask etc.
Andy Blackburn 1486 days ago
I’m yet to find a decent way to list the top performing pages on a high authority site… though one of the new lab tools on SEOMoz comes quite close… it’s still link based though.
Jimmy 1473 days ago
So, let me get this straight. You were snooping around to see if it was worth spamming and now you’re “outing” it for being spammed?
Anthony 1471 days ago
http://www.anthonyshapley.co.uk@Jimmy – can’t say I’ve ever “spammed” anything.
Wonderweb Media 1395 days ago
http://www.wonderwebmedia.co.ukIve noticed search engine rankings of a clients website drop overnight due to excessive comment spam that was not related to the content of the page.