Google Penalty vs. being Blocked and Grey Bar

Google can and does give different types and levels of penalties. This can range from just blocking a site from passing PageRank and or link juice to a more serious (death) penalty of taking the site out of the Google cache and out of the Google index altogether.
Google does not really use the term TrustRank and Matt Cutts has clarified this in the past. Google does however implement this concept of "can a site be trusted" as Google does look at and evaluate the sites you link out to. Who you link to is also important for the SEO concept of co citation of citation theory.

So currently Google can give penalties via automatic filters that look for spam, malware, hidden text links, duplicate content, etc.

Google has a staff of Quality Engineers that review all the submitted SPAM reports and manual penalties can be imposed. Let's look at a specific example of this. Please start at this page:
http://www.w3.org/QA/
This is one of the most powerful sites on the Internet, and a PR9 page. Now look at the outbound links at the bottom right of the page. This is fine with Google and please notice that all of the pages this site links to are PR8 pages except one of them.
http://www.accessify.com/ which is a PR5 page because of outbound links at the bottom of the page Google does not like. So this is a case of a manual penalty being imposed by Google and the accessify site should really be a PR8 and Google has reduced it to a PR5 to discourage future text link sales and penalize the site. Generally when Google does this it also blocks any link power or juice to be passed by accessify and the sites it links out to. This case is also interesting because it shows it takes time for PageRank penalties to propagate though the Internet. E.g. every page that accessify links out to is currently a PR6. I suspect that after the next PR update these will all drop.

Google has had a very long history of blocking sites from passing PageRank and link juice (Link Juice = PageRank + any other factors Google uses to value links).
Another example we can look at is: web-stat.com which should be a PR8 and Google has penalized them to a PR5. This is an interesting case, because this counter site and almost all counter sites have been blocked from passing PageRank for a long time. Recently Google dropped their PR and all the advertisers are now gone. However Google has still kept the web-stat site at PR5. Generally Google will keep this penalty on a site until the site requests the penalty removed and promises Google in writing that they will never do what caused the penalty again. One more example is seroundtable.com that should be a PR7 and Google has reduced it to a PR4.

Still adding more to this article. Please check back soon.

Regarding the Google toolbar and what the grey bar means. In the past the grey bar was the kiss of death. The worst penality you could get, even worse than PR0.
Today that is not true, any new page one creates even this page shows up as a grey bar on the Google Toolbar at first.

Studying Google Patent Information and what you might Learn

This is an interesting well written article about a Google patent filed in 2003. The author does an excellent job of explaining that this does not mean Google is using this exact patent today. However this article http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=929 will explain several important concepts for search engine optimization and may help you.

I can tell you for sure that Google currently does also look at who you link out to. So to keep it simple one could say if your site links out to only spam crap, then most likely Google will consider your site spam crap. Something to think about when people ask you to put up a link to their web site for them.

We want excellent articles to publish on our web sites.

We want to publish your articles. Please email your article(s) to:

tomforrest@htpcompany.com

We can not allow comments on this blog because too many Spammers write crap in this Blog when comments are turned on.

So please email your comments to me and we will publish them here or on other sites we own.

This is an Important Matt Cutts Post to Read

This is one of the more interesting SEO posts by Matt Cutts that I recommend all webmasters and business owners read.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-hell/

Feedback to Google Regarding SEO and Ads

Google has been trying to implement more filters to block and / or penalize paid links. Some of what they are doing seems confused and off track. E.g. Googles priority list seems to be wrong. We see sites blocked and penalized that should not be, and questionable sites penalized when clear blatant abuse goes undetected and the wrong doers are harvesting huge results, while Google seems to do nothing about it.

Google knows about this huge abuse I discuss below and has done nothing about it.

I did a Google search on " blog.txt theme by Scott and sponsored by Flower Delivery"

Very interesting to me that it is a clear abuse, and appears to me to be helping all wrong doers with high PageRank and high rankings on Google for their important keywords.

Please see the first result of my Google search:

http://buzzdroid.com/wordpress/themes/wordpress-beware-the-sponsored-link-theme-do-you-know-where-your-pagerank-is-going/

This is an example of the "obvious low hanging paidlink spam fruit" I am talking about.
______________________________________________________

I was reading a well known web designers site and he made some interesting points, to bad he does not know he is in danger by linking to a well know text link brokers web site. He makes the following and I beleive correct and insightful comments about dealing with web advertising clients.

1. I think my first mistake right off the bat was offering too many choices.
   
2. I ended up simplifying things within a couple days, dropping some of the ad options.
   
3. People need to be able to see value and if there are too many choices, it makes it difficult for them to make any choice at all.
   
4. People also tend to ask more questions to clarify any comparison between the ad options, so the more ad options the more questions people ask.
   
5. That is why we try to get them to make a small purchase and then ask them to buy more later. Sometimes they buy multiple ads over a 3-5 day period. The key is to get them into the buying mode and away from all the questions.
   
6. Keeping it simple makes it easier for everybody.

Alexa Traffic Rankings are WAY Wrong

I have known for some time that the Alexa traffic rankings are way off. Off by tons... not a scientific way to explain this.

So please see this interesting article to learn more about the how and why Alexa traffic rankings are so defective and not correct.




http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/estimating-webmaster-skew-in-alexa-metrics/

SEO News

Hello,

A great site to visit and read about all the lastest SEO News from multiple good sources is:

http://www.gccnews.com

Please try it and see if you like it.

Linkadage

Linkadage seems to be going down the tubes.

Blocked and worthless links being sold by people who know they are worthless.

A rude and ungrateful site owner. Stay away from Linkadage.

Please click on the link in the title above to read others negitive comments regarding Linkadage.

Another company to stay away from is text-link.us they are owned by searchfit.us, they sell worthless links and do bad seo and shopping carts, they totally screwed over another company I know and caused them problems with Google, and then I had to help this company recover from the problems they caused them. These guys also cheated me out of $8500. So we have outed the bad guys.

Check out this new blog we are creating

Hello,

Please visit this new blog we are creating.

http://gototom.blogspot.com

It explains the reasons why and the topics it will cover.

Google Webmaster Central

Google has added a lot of good information to this page:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

You should read it several times and use the free tools Google provides.

Links are like Diamonds and Wine

Please click on and read this information below.

http://gototom2.blogspot.com/2006/09/80-of-webmasters-are-wrong-about-seo.html


This is still one of the best articles for people to read to understand many details and complex issues involved with SEO.

Search Engine Marketing Data

North American advertisers spent $9.6 billion on search engine marketing in 2006. I do not have the current worldwide numbers. I wish I did have worldwide numbers for this report. 84% of this $9.6 billion was invested in paid search. E.g. Google Adwords, Yahoo and MSN PPC, etc.

So only 14% went to natural search engine optimization (SEO), Yahoo's paid inclusion scam accounts for 1% or $96 million. We hope the FTC stops Yahoo from this paid inclusion scam against the general public and gives Yahoo a huge fine for this advertising scam.

1% for agency fees and in house development account for 1%.

So my question is why is natural SEO still such a low percent of the total. I think it will increase in the future as Google's PPC prices have gone though the roof. Keyword terms that we used to pay $2 for are now $10. At some point people will start to shift more of their Internet marketing dollars to SEO I think. 75% of businesses use some SEO efforts to promote their businesses. For many years people have said they want branding however they generally are still more focused on measuring direct response rates. TV advertising , print ads and newspaper advertising have been dropping and Internet marketing and advertising are growing, we see a significant shift of how corporate budgets are invested. We predict this trend will continue for many years, as the Internet is still a young child.

More from Matt Cutts of Google

I do not see Matt Cutts comment in very many blogs. I might feel a little nervous if I knew Matt was reading my blog on a regular basis. Sometimes I am critical of Google and ....

Anyway Matt has always been helpful to me and responds to my emails very quickly. I do not send him many, I try to keep a low profile with Google, and only talk to them as a last resort. This in itself sets Google head and shoulders above Yahoo (I strongly dislike Yahoo) or MSN.

It is wonderful that a $10 billion dollar a year company has a senior Ph.d level engineer who responds to people like me :) :)

Below is a comment Matt made in some other guys blog.


Matt Cutts Says:

December 20th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
I think you put this pretty well, Eric. Search engines want links to be real: editorial votes based on quality and merit.

With Yahoo, you’re paying for the reviewing service; Yahoo rejects plenty of submissions.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Tom Forrest Says: This is the same with our Directories, we reject about 85+% of people who submit their listings to us. There are tons of Spammers trying to get into quality Directories and web sites like ours.
We just keep deleting them.

This is an interesting article and funny too.

Please click on the link to this article, it is very interesting to read and may make you laugh.

http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

The SPAM problem just keeps getting Worse

I really hate Spammers, I find they are generally frustrated and unsuccessful people, venting out in a sick way at the world.

Anyway I had to delete and turn off the comments on this Blog for a while, because of problems with Spammers leaving a bunch of garbage in the comments.

Please email me at: tomforrest@htpcompany.com if you want to send me any comments. I use www.cloudmark.com as a SPAM filter and it works well and reports the Spammers to a database, so that is why I can give out my email and not worry about SPAM.

54% of all emails sent today are SPAM, and unfortunately it seems to be getting worse not better over time.

Learn about SEO and Internet Advertising.

Below is an email we sent to one of our clients to explain the pros and cons of Paid Google ads (PPC - sponsored links on Google) VS. text links for building natural or organic rankings in Google.


Hello Steven,

We set a limit on how much we spend on Google ads per day. This is for several reasons. First we are limited by your budget, and we also need to place ads on authority web sites to build up your natural rankings (non paid). So after the Google ads reach the daily limit then they turn off for the day and then start the next day. So if you check early in the day USA time you will see the Google ads we put up for your sites.

We suggest we check and monitor your bookings as there are different types of Google ads. There are ads only on the Google search engine, ads on other search engines Google provides search results for like AOL, etc. Then there are ads on travel related sites in the Google network (content ads). We try all of these and monitor your results and see which type has the best conversion ratios, this is an ongoing process and takes many months to optimize.

The best results come from achieving top natural rankings. This will happen faster on the Chicago site as it is older and has a good PageRank already. It takes many months to build up on new sites as Google does not let knew sites rank highly quickly. We have some methods to work around this, E.g. We create pages with all your content and links on long aged sites we own and these pages will rank well sooner and also link to your new site. Over time we will show you detailed examples of these. When these hosted pages and text link ads are done properly our clients benefit in two ways.

1. People see these SEO ads and click on them and go to your site and hopefully purchase your products and services.

2. These SEO ads (text link ads) will help improve your search engine rankings for your important keywords.


Regarding your budget question:

Yes giving us a bigger budget will increase your traffic even more, we suggest you think long term and plan on keeping all the SEO links we place for you long term. These are for building the natural rankings, the longer we build and keep the links up the better the results will become. It is like wine and diamonds for the links. Links are like wine because the longer they are aged the better (more effective they are). Also once you lose them you have to start the aging process all over again.

This is not the case with the sponsored PPC links (paid Google ads).

SEO links ( text link ads or graphic / text ads) are like diamonds, because links can vary greatly in value and quality just like diamonds vary greatly in value and quality.

Please click here and read this article for more details and technical background information regarding text link ads.


So while we would like you to increase your budget with us, we would to be careful and monitor the results and make sure you stay with this long term.

The biggest mistake we see people make is to put up SEO links (non PPC ads) and then run out of funding before they achieve the best results.

We do not know how much knowledge you have regarding these topics, so if we are explaining things you already know please understand we are trying our best to help you.

So the benefit of the paid Google ads (PPC = Pay Per Click) is that we can turn them on and off quickly. The disadvantage is they can be expensive and they are not as powerful as the natural or organic listings. Natural or organic are terms used for the non PPC ads.

Perhaps the best way to explain this to you is by example.

Let’s use htpcompany and htp company as the examples.

So if you type htpcompany on Google you see us on the left (natural listing) and on the right side of the page under sponsored links (sponsored links equals PPC).

Being on the left is much more powerful (5 to 30 times more valuable than the PPC listings on the right) , however it is still good and useful to have both. That is why we do both for our own sites and our client sites.

If you do not understand some of this let us know and we will try to explain better. Sometimes it is more difficult to explain via email, we know this is the best way for you, however it can be more difficult to explain sometimes.

Now if you type htp company with a space on Google you see another example of being on the left and righ side of the page.

HTP Company

HTP Company ( Phone: 805-493-4450 ) provides the best Internet marketing company, Internet advertising and SEO services in the world.
www.htpcompany.com/ - 26k - Cached - Similar pages


People phone us and say “Google says you are the best in the world." They think Google picked us as the best in the world. When we actually control this via the meta tags in the html.


Any way this email is getting to long and the bottom line is we are happy to have you increase your budget as long as you can afford to stay with this long term. We do not want you to spend too much too fast and run out of funding. Again we are trying to give you good advice and help you.

Apple Computer's SEO ranking - funny story

For years SEO experts including myself have used the keyword computers as an example when teaching classes about search engine optimization. Apple's title tag was just Apple and they were # 1 on Google for the keyword computers.

This is an example to use to show how powerful text links and PageRank are. Not having the keyword in the title tag and still being #1 for such a competive keyword. Then about 6-12 months ago I saw Apple drop down to #2 or #3.

Meanwhile Google has been adding multiple title tags for web sites in their search engine. They do this for HTPcompany.com also. I can find our true title tag showing in the Google index sometimes and the one Google assigned us for other searches. Now Google is doing the same thing for Apple. Search for computers on Google to see what I mean. So now Apple is #1 for computers on a Google search.

The funny part to me is that when you search for computers and click on the first listing (Apple), you do not see anything about computers, it is all about selling you an ipod.

It seems like Google should also question why is our #1 listing for computers, not about computers, however it is all about selling you an ipod :) .

Can one link still make your site a PR9 ?

Google is currently doing a PageRank (PR) update. I found some very interesting data from this current PR update. Google has blocked so many web sites from passing on link juice (see post below); that I wondered if it would even be possible to get a PR10 or PR9 link that even worked today.

First there are not many PR9 or PR10 sites. Most of which would not give out any links to anyone. E.g. try to get a link on www.msn.com ...etc.

Then there are all the high PR blocked sites like counter sites, weather sites, newspaper sites, television sites, etc. that have been blocked from working by Google for years. Look at www.webstat.com as an example of a site that has been blocked for years. If you see the 20 footer links at the bottom, you see just how many people do not know what they are doing and are just wasting their money buying worthless text links.

Back to the title question - Can one link still make your site a PR9 ?

Yes.

I have purchased ads on a web designer site in the past and I track thousands of sites long term to see how they are doing. This site just went from a PR7 to a PR9. Extremely unusual and rare today. So I studied the sites backlinks and found a PR10 site linking to this web designer site making it a PR9 and 5 other sites a PR9. Wow, a PR10 link that works. Now we will track it and see how long it works. We also noticed one of the newly created PR9 sites can also pass PR and make a sponsored office products and photocopier sites PR8 home pages. Finding this is to an SEO, is like an archeologist finding a rare fossil, a true feeling of excitement.

Now we will track and report back to you about how this plays out. The PR9 site is for sale if anyone is interested let me know. The site was a PR7 site until this recent update and it is a nice site with thousands of natural links, not just the PR10 link.

80% of webmasters are wrong about SEO and Text Links

This web page was updated on March 18, 2008 .

We receive thousands of phone calls and emails every year about SEO and Text Links. Eighty percent or more of people contacting us have the totally Wrong ideas about what works and what is important for outstanding results in the major search engines. Below are details, samples and history of people contacting us with their requirements. Also you will find useful SEO information that will help you.

Many people phone saying " I need cheap SEO and cheap links and tons of cheap links. "

I ask why.... They say I want to out rank my competitor.

I say.... Do you even know how many backlinks your competitors have and from what web sites?

They think it is a pure numbers game. All links are equal and just get more and you win.

WRONG Approach.

Someone with fewer backlinks , e.g. Site A has 300 high quality natural embedded text links from topic related authority sites can out rank Site B with 20,000 low quality text links. This includes all the webmasters that do article submission SPAM (duplicate content SPAM).

In the last few weeks Google has penalized many sites for selling text links, or as Matt Cutts (Google - manager / engineer) refers to it as PPP (Paid PageRank Passing) advertising, so major sites like Forbes.com, Washington Post, Search Engine Roundtable, etc. have had their PageRank dropped from PR7 to PR4 or PR5. Some people that have been penalized think this is just a Google update and do not understand that they have been manually penalized by Google. Also their links have been blocked from passing link juice for the last 2+ years in some cases. Now this is just Google sending a strong message. Also by lowering the PR of these sites, it makes it harder for them to sell their Google devalued links. At first I used the words "worthless links", however that is not correct, because even though I am not fond of these sites, they do receive a ton of traffic and people do click on their links.

Then a few days later (10-26-07) Google did do a complete PageRank toolbar update. It is important to understand that what was done prior to 10-26-07 was a manual penalty given to those selected sites by Google, and not related to the PR update done a few days later. So just to be clear Google did the manual penalties for a few weeks, then when those were completed they did the normal PR toolbar export update. This seems like a logical engineering approach to me, If I worked at Google I would do it the same way. Unfortunately it did confuse many people and they were not sure what was happening, many people are still not sure what happened.

When the PR toolbar update was done on Friday night, it did allow us to study algorithmic enhancements from Google to further detect links that Google does not like, what Google believes are paid links. These new enhancements from Google are not perfect, some / many paid links still go undetected and there are cases where Google has penalized innocent sites. You can see and understand this by tracking how Google valued or penalized links that go to internal pages of sites that only have one link pointing to them. We study and test thousands of cases like this every year. We see when Google likes a link, and when Google does not like a link, and the clear and conclusive effects for both cases.

There are two reasons why so many peoples PR (PageRank) dropped: 1. Google knocked out a huge amount of PR by penalizing all these PR10, PR9, PR8, and PR7 sites for selling text links. Because some of the sites they penalized were still passing link juice. Some were not and had been blocked from passing PR (PageRank) for years already. 2. The natural expansion of the Internet means a fixed amount of PageRank is divided up among all web pages on the Internet, so more pages simply means less PageRank for everyone.

Search engines want to filter out and devalue links they do not like or trust. Two major criterion they are looking for are paid or purchased links and traded low quality (spammy) links. A term you will hear in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry is TrustRank. Meaning can the search engines trust a link? Most people are ignorant of all this, and it is easy for the major search engines to write algorithms to filter out the link juice passing to a web site that trades low quality or purchases text links. The search engines may at their discretion apply various penalties to web sites that they feel do not follow their often vague guidelines. The funny thing (at least to me) is that most of the best links are paid for in some way, the payment may not be in money, it may be in other ways, and the major search engines do not even know it. It is under their radar, however since 80% or more of the people trying to purchase or trade links are ignorant and so obvious, it is easy for the search engines to not count the links they do not like from these people and their terrible link building methods. I want to mention a few points about what I just said above and clarify without getting into the long and unresolved debate about paid links. So for example you have been doing business with a company for years and at dinner you say please put up a link to my web site saying how great my company is. This is fine, now what if you have to give your client a $3,000 discount on his next order of pet food for him to put up this link? Is that a paid link? What if he really does think you have a great company and wants to vouch for you, and he is just using this as a way to squeeze a pet food order discount out of you. Is it okay? See how far we can go with this....

This is why you will now see some text link brokers and SEO experts that follow strict guidelines to try to protect their links from being blocked or filtered out or penalized by the major search engines.
E.g. they will not except spammy web sites or low quality advertisers, they will not display their inventory publicly, and they will not allow their publishers to link back to them. The first one "not excepting spammy or low quality web sites" seems like a huge win for both the search engines and web surfers. Great search engines like Google now look at who you link to, and if it is to all garbage low quality web sites, guess what, the search engines will not trust your links and the spammy sites you link to.

Please click here to read another useful article about SEO link building.

Some background and history below.

In 2004 Google had a long list of blocked sites with high PageRank that people were purchasing text links on. So first Google blocked hundreds / thousands of PR7, PR8 and PR9 sites from passing PageRank. There are many theories and reasons about what Google used as criteria for blocking sites from passing PageRank, which all relate to what appears to be natural. Or at least what Google considers to be natural links. One example of this is site wide links, the logic search engines use on this is that it is not natural for a site to have thousands of backlinks from the same site all with the same anchor text... this whole machine template generated concept that search engines do not like to see. So in some cases they may only give credit for one or a few of the links, when a site has thousands of inbound links from the same web site, unfortunately if we like it or not Google often just blocked all these sites from passing PageRank at all, this is especially true if the site wide links are high in number (over 20) and to off topic or male enhancement type products :). There are very few exceptions to his, however in 85%+ of cases Google just filtered out all the PageRank passing ability of these high PR8 and PR9 sites selling site wide text links, especially if the sponsored site wide links were footer links and to non related topic sites. Matt Cutts of Google has written about this in his blog and even given very specific examples. Sites that are doing the above will find that if they are not currently blocked and or penalized they soon will be. We keep a database of blocked sites and track them over time, generally if Google blocks a site they do not unblock them in the future. Once the link trust is gone, Google is reluctant to give these sites a second chance.

Google also broke their backlinks checker on purpose to keep people (SEO's) from seeing if a site passes PageRank. Prior to May of 2005 SEO's could use the Google backlink checker tool to see if a PR9 site was passing PageRank to the sites it linked to.

So wow, Google blocked many powerful sites from passing PageRank and prevented people from seeing what backlinks worked and which ones did not work. Today most people do not know that the Google backlink checker was broken on purpose by Google. We are constantly explaining to people that it is a waste of time to even look at the Google backlinks checker. I think this just makes Google look bad and evil, why have a tool that you broke on purpose and mislead the general public?
E.g. you can not trust Google. There are other tools that do work and most good SEO's know how to check backlinks, however knowing if they work or not is another story, please phone us at (805-493-4450) if you need to hire a good SEO company to help you. We see thousands of webmasters just wasting their money buying blocked and worthless text links.

As the cat and mouse game continues... in 2005 more SEO's and Text Link Brokers, started selling many thousands of low PageRank links on PR1, PR2, and PR3 sites. The idea being that Google blocked the high PR powerful sites from working so buy thousands of low PR text links and obtain great search results that way. This worked for a while.

Now in the summer / fall of 2006 Google has de listed millions of low PR junk pages. So all those webmasters who purchased many thousands of permanent or rental links on low quality, low PR pages have nothing to show for all their time effort and money invested. Furthermore it appears Google is penalizing sites involved with these spammy Internet marketing methods.

The moral of the story is you need high quality, natural, embedded text links on outstanding authority and search engine trusted web sites with excellent quality unique content to win.



Please email your comments to: TomForrest@HTPcompany.com , please let us know if we may publish your comments or not.


Return to the top of this page.

What is TrustRank?

Google has / is implementing a new set of algorithms based on the concept of TrustRank. Unfortunately they are having problems getting this concept to work properly.

We are seeing way too many high quality unique content web pages being de indexed by Google and the Spammers are already figuring out ways to work around this TrustRank concept.

Hopefully Google will be able to make this new set of algorithms work better soon. Please read this paper (link above) to learn more about it.

Also please read this patent document on Trustrank .

Excepts below:

Trustrank is a link analysis technique related to PageRank. Trustrank is a method for separating reputable, good pages on the Web from web spam. Trustrank is based on the presumption that good documents on the Web seldom link to spam. Trustrank involves two steps, one of seed selection and another of score propagation. The trustrank of a document is a measure of the likelihood that the document is a reputable (i.e., a nonspam) document.

As we have mentioned below, Google has been very busy this year, with many changes to their database and algorithms. However we and everyone we talk to do not see any improvements in the quality of search results, at least not yet.

We only see negitive effects of high quality good content pages being de indexed by Google, which harms both Internet publishers and web surfers. I wish I could have something more positive to say about the Google search results after Google has invested millions of dollars into all these projects.

http://gototom2.blogspot.com/2006/07/what-is-trustrank.html

Google has changed a lot in the last few months.

I am generating SEO and back link reports for one of our long term clients that owns multiple web sites.

Now a days it is more difficult for even the best SEO experts, because Google has recently made this even more complex.

If a clients web site is penalized by Google it may still rank very well on Yahoo or MSN. The tough part is what causes Google to penalize a site is the exact reason that Yahoo and / or MSN may rank the site highly. Within the last two months Google has made many big changes. They completed the move to the Big Daddy database and implemented several new algorithms to:

1. Delete millions of pages from the Google database (cache). This has many ramifications to Google and to non Google webmasters. If a small webmaster has developed a newer site and has invested a lot of time developing good quality content and also has Google AdWords on these pages, it not only knocks the wind out of the smaller webmaster, it also hurts Google. Google loses ad revenue and losses its stature as the premiere search engine that indexes all excellent unique quality content.

The important factor to consider for my clients is:
if Google deleted a page or many pages on different urls that they have text links on...how does this effect them?

I believe Google analyzes your back link ratio and decides if your back links come from "good" or "bad" sites however complex the methods are Google chooses to define this. If you have too many back links from sites Google does not like you may be penalized. We can say you have a bad link ratio in Google's eyes. How can we know what Google likes or does not like?
Well if within the last 2 months pages that show up with having PR on the Google PR meter and are not in the Google cache. This means Google recently took these pages out of the Google database. They took them out either because they have to few back links or bad back links Google does not like. Either way you do not want links from these pages because they either do not help you with Google or may even penalize you with Google. Again here is the catch, if you get rid of these you lose the benefit they are giving you with MSN and Yahoo.

2. Even if a page is in the Google cache not all links are created equal. We have a database of over 2,000 high PR web sites that are in the Google cache and have been blocked from passing PageRank for over 2 years. This include most counter sites, major newspaper sites, major radio sites, etc. etc.

So what is a good link and what is a natural link?
How would Google define this?

We really do not know for sure, however it is wise SEO practice to consider these concepts. E.g. One would hope that if the whitehouse.gov placed a link to this web site it would count for maximum value with Google. We also know / believe Google breaks the values up on a scale to rate:

i) can a site pass PageRank? Does Google trust this sites "reputation"? also some sites appear to be able to pass partial PageRank. It used to be 6 months ago that a site either could pass PageRank or Not (binary), that is no longer the case.

ii) Google also looks at a sites "reputation" as being able to pass anchor text value.

So let's use a hypothetical extreme example to make this clear.

Apple.com a PR10 site links to your computer business and also to your friends pizza business web site.

We believe apple is not blocked from passing PageRank as they do not sell links and it would be extremely difficult and rare for apple to link to any site. We are just trying to illustrate our point here not debate the facts on every site. Anyway based on the points above would both the pizza site and the computer site receive the maximum PageRank power and full anchor text ranking power from Google?

We do not think so, of course we may be wrong.

We believe the computer business web site would receive maximum points from Google on both PageRank and anchor text values being passed.

We believe the pizza business web site would only receive partial value for PageRank being passed and little or no value for anchor text power being passed.

So the above is want our testing shows us to be the way Google works today. I hope this helps people understand and realize how amazingly complex Google is getting with this SEO stuff.

Report Yahoo to the Federal Trade Commission

Yahoo can not mix up paid and non paid listings and present it to the public as all non paid listings. Please read details below.

This is a major advertising scam against the general public. Yahoo needs to identify all paid ads; they should not deceive the general public in this manner. The FTC should stop them and fine Yahoo for the $100,000,000 they earn using this scam every year.


-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Forrest [mailto:tomforrest@htpcompany.com]
Sent: Sunday, June 11, 2006 11:35 AM
To: navinap@yahoo-inc.com; jeremy@zawodny.com; jzawodn@yahoo-inc.com
Cc: Tom Forrest; laceyphillips@htpcompany.com
Subject: RE: Yahoo! Change - I need a Yahoo managers name and phone number to resolve this problem
Importance: High


Hello,

I want to talk with a Yahoo manager, someone that can help me.

I purchased a Lifetime listing in the Yahoo Directory in 1998.

I want my site www.htpcompany.com indexed in Yahoo.

Please put my site back in the Yahoo Directory and take off any suppression to index my site. Please treat htpcompany fairly; we just want to be naturally indexed. Currently it appears Yahoo is suppressing and preventing this from happening unless we pay Yahoo for every page of our site and every click we receive. See details below.

Yahoo should have all or most of our pages indexed for no fees, just like MSN and Google currently do. Also the FTC should stop Yahoo from using this paid inclusion scam / scheme as it is unfair to Google and MSN that the government has not stopped Yahoo from using this unfair and misleading practice already. The FTC needs to enforce the law.

Currently the way Yahoo does this unfair and illegal search suppression is by only letting our web site and millions of other web sites show up in a Yahoo search if you type "htpcompany.com" . You only have one page indexed and only one very specific way to search for it. This is a scam. I am starting a group to report all the people Yahoo has unfairly done this to, and report Yahoo to the Federal Trade Commission.

I am not going to pay Yahoo 30 cents per click if someone wants to search for "htpcompany" or "Tom Forrest".

It just makes Yahoo look very bad since I am # 1 in Google and MSN for Tom Forrest or htpcompany. If you search for "tom forrest" on Yahoo Tom Hanks shows up as the #1 result. Is that how Yahoo ranks today?
Yahoo is the worst search engine.

Furthermore I believe it is illegal to not mark all the people that pay you for every click as sponsored listings. By FTC rules you need to make it clear what are paid listings and what are natural non paid listings. Yahoo is clearly in violation of FTC rules. Yahoo can not mix up paid and not paid listings and present it to the public as all non paid listings.

Please visit this web site to read more about Yahoo's terrible service.

http://gototom2.blogspot.com/


I look forward to hearing from you.




Kind regards,

Tom Forrest

Phone: 805-493-4450

http://www.htpcompany.com



-----Original Message-----
From: navinap@yahoo-inc.com [mailto:navinap@yahoo-inc.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2006 5:24 AM
To: Tom Forrest
Subject: Yahoo! Change

The valid changes you have requested to have been completed. However you will only be able to view it when we update the database which typically takes place on a periodic basis, mostly at night. If the changes are not present or valid within 1-4 days, please resubmit your change request using the online form:

http://add.yahoo.com/fast/change

Please be aware that Yahoo! reserves the right to edit change requests when needed. Some of the originally requested changes may be denied.

Thanks,

The Yahoo! Team

http://gototom2.blogspot.com/2006/06/report-yahoo-to-federal-trade.html

Boycott Yahoo and Why Yahoo Sucks

SEO - Marketing - Advertising

Why you should Boycott Yahoo and why Yahoo sucks.

I own many web sites and most of them receive a lot of traffic from Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Then about a year ago or more Yahoo sent me some email that seemed like Internet extortion to me. Pay Yahoo for every single click I was already receiving for free. I have been trying for over a year to understand why they did this to some sites and not to others. Also I hate Yahoo because of all their previous business scams. In 1998 I signed up for a lifetime listing in Yahoo. Yahoo then decided people should pay for a listing every year and cheated the people who paid for the lifetime directory listing, Yahoo has cheated a lot of webmasters this way. No one at Yahoo will help or talk to webmasters (see posts) below.

Here is what you get if you use Yahoo's paid inclusion service.


URL Category Review Fee Cost Per Click
http://www.htpcompany.com/ Professional Services $49.00 $0.30

http://www.htpcompany.com/gototom_tom_forrest.htm Professional Services $29.00 $0.30
Total Review Fee $78.00

Domain/Host Click
Deposit
www.htpcompany.com $50.00
Minimum Click Deposit $50.00

Promotion Code $0.00
Total Invoice: $128.00

So how screwed up and unfair can Yahoo be... they want me to pay them 30 cents if someone types htpcompany on a Yahoo search and clicks on my link. Or if some one searches for my name, I am #1 for Tom Forrest on Google and MSN however Yahoo will not even index my resume page unless I pay them.

I wish the FTC or appropriate Government agentcies would go after Yahoo for this Search Submit Express scam. If you submit for free Yahoo supresses your listing so that only if you type htpcompany.com will it come up. Clearly the Government should step in and punish Yahoo for their evil scams. All listings that pay per click in Yahoo should be marked as sponsored listings. Since Yahoo will not index and include a sites pages unless the site pays Yahoo.

I kown other webmasters that also hate Yahoo and want to boycott Yahoo. Now we need to invest our time and spread the word about Yahoo's evil scams and try to have the FTC take action against Yahoo.

Do you have a Yahoo horror story? Post it here.

We spent 3 hours phoning Yahoo yesterday and recieved the same terrible help and support. Just the same run a round we always get, with no one that knows what they are doing and no one to help us. Then we sent the email below to:

dir-support@yahoo-inc.com

Hello,

If Yahoo indexes our pages and ranks our site fairly we can stay in the Yahoo Directory.

If Yahoo is going to treat us unfairly and suppress our natural organic rankings and not index our pages because we are in the Yahoo directory then take us out of the Yahoo directory.

I noticed we are ranking well today and come up for the search for htpcompany without the .com , and many others just like we do on Google and MSN. We should rank highly for many keywords.

Is this fixed now? Is it stable?


Please respond to us.


Also please read the details of this problem and how Yahoo has treated us for over a year now.


We are very unhappy with the poor help and support we have received from Yahoo over the last year.

Yahoo support and help is Terrible.


Hello,

Will someone at Yahoo please respond to me?

I have been paying Yahoo money since 1998 and this is how I am treated.

I have been phoning these numbers and just get the run around ... 408-349-1001 receptionist that tells me to phone 408-349-1572 ... talked to a manger named Phil that does not know who can help me and told me to phone 408-349-1001, who then tells me to phone 408-349-1572.... etc. etc.

This problem has been going on for over a year now. I can't even get anyone to help me.

Please help!




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Tom Forrest [mailto:tomforrest@htpcompany.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 08, 2006 8:20 PM
To: ystfeedback@yahoo.com
Cc: 'Tom Forrest'; Lacey Phillips - HTPcompany.com; jzawodn@yahoo-inc.com
Subject: FW: Problem with Yahoo indexing www.htpcompany.com
Importance: High


Hello,

I have had this problem for over six months now.

Is there someone I can phone to get this fixed?

Please help me.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Tom Forrest [mailto:tomforrest@htpcompany.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 10:35 AM
To: 'ystfeedback@yahoo.com'
Cc: 'jzawodn@yahoo-inc.com'; Tom Forrest; Lacey Phillips - HTPcompany.com
Subject: Problem with Yahoo indexing www.htpcompany.com
Importance: High


Hi,

Please read below.

Please help me. What should I do?




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Tom Forrest [mailto:tomforrest@htpcompany.com]
Sent: Friday, January 27, 2006 1:29 AM
To: 'jzawodn@yahoo-inc.com'
Cc: Tom Forrest; Lacey Phillips - HTPcompany.com
Subject: Hello , re: www.htpcompany.com


Hi,


I am an Internet publisher that enjoys reading your blog.

I need advise for a problem I am having with Yahoo.

Please help me and put me in contact with someone that can help me.

My web site ranks very well with Google and MSN, it used to rank very well with Yahoo also. Then many months ago, Yahoo asked me to pay for all the traffic I was being sent for free. Your paid inclusion program.

I did not want to pay and frankly it works better for me when my other sites were just naturally indexed by Inktomi and not in the Yahoo Directory.

I asked about this and he thought if I did not renew my Yahoo Directory listing, I would just be indexed naturally by the Inktomi search engine and put into Yahoo with my title tag and not my Yahoo Directory tag.

So I did not renew my Yahoo Directory listing and Yahoo has keep me in the Directory and not indexed my site.

So basically I am screwed by Yahoo, sorry about the wording.

I am willing to pay Yahoo some money, to be in the Yahoo Directory, however I just want to be indexed naturally (Inktomi ?)for all my pages and by my title tag, not my currently expired Yahoo Directory listing assigned many years ago by a Yahoo editor.

Please help me.

May I phone you?

Thank you in advance for your help.



Kind regards,

Tom Forrest

Phone: 805-493-4450

http://www.htpcompany.com

search engine optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing a website to perform better or rank higher in search engine results pages. Web sites that rank high in search engines generate tremendous business from those searching for services, products, and/or companies to do business with.

Every business online needs to be visible where their customers are searching. This need sparks an entire industry of professionals who study search engine results and search engine algorithms to better predict how to optimize web pages to appear near or at the top. This industry is referred to as "SEO" or search engine optimization.

Some believe that as the actual "optimization" process becomes increasingly difficult, that the optimization aspect of the business deteriorates and leaves only the process of an overall understanding of how search engines work and making educated guesses at how to use search engine marketing techniques in general to increase visibility.



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