Google Take Out More Private Link Networks As Battle Continues
Over the past few days there have been a number of blackhat websites complaining that their websites have seen reductions in search engine visibility and it seems that their issues are deeper than an algorithmic penalisation after an official word from Google showed that they have been hard at work once again.
According to reports, Google's Matt Cutts revealed that Google had been working hard on the detection and elimination of private link networks and started to action punishment against those that were found to be behind a large number of link sales, including one network that boasted that it featured "NO footprints".
Cutts addressed the latest actions directly through his Twitter account, seeming to taunt the network owners after making use of a line that they used within their sales message to potential customers, saying ""There is absolutely NO footprints linking the websites together" Oh, Anglo Rank."
A look into the network revealed that it was a service that was being offered on Black Hat World SEO forums, showing various members showing an interest in the service that was set up following the owner's previous network being caught and punished in the same manner as Anglo Rank has been now.
In a Twitter interaction between Cutts and Search Engine Land's editor-in-chief Matt McGee, the head of Google Webspam team revealed that those that have made use of the private network will begin to find that they have messages landing into their Google Webmaster Tools account supporting the search engines latest findings.
The notification that Anglo Rank had been found seems to show that regardless of the predicted footprints that link networks together being broken, there are ways that Google are using in order to capture the owner's and those that have used the Google Guidelines breaking service and Cutts was keen to indicate that this was not the only link network to have been found.
Oh and it seems that Matt Cutts has some wise words to share with us all…
3 Comments
Jason - http://www.prototypeseo.co.uk
As soon as it’s live and in a bulk package, Google can take it down. Surely it’s just a case of buying a few packages and pulling those sites down? They might not hit every single one but I’m sure 90% of the customers share at least on website and will be hit.
And then to see the OP in the threads scrambling around trying to convince users that their service is 100% fit and running still.
Mark - http://www.digeratimarketing.co.uk
@Jason; that would be an easy way to take down a single network. That approach doesn’t scale particularly well, though? Surely better to train an algo with known networks to get it a decent fitness so it can flag these things automatically.
Jason - http://www.prototypeseo.co.uk
You’re right, but it’s probably quicker to manually pull them down and then use that data and find correlations between them.
Sometimes, the only way to determine whether these “networks” (they’re not networks, they’re a collection of sites) or gaming the system are by manual reviews or BST threads on BHW/WF. Search engines must be under the assumption that there WILL ALWAYS be people gaming the system ,they can’t stop that. But they have to stop Joe Public from doing it.