Yet can Google afford to do nothing, and let the quality of their search results decline?
In this example case of a site penalized you can see the frustration of this webmaster as she has no clue about any of this.
I don't even know what an "unnatural link" is. I read the Help topics linked in the email and they were not of any help. I have no idea why I received this because I have not done anything to artificially boost my traffic. I'm not part of any "link scheme." I haven't changed anything that would cause this, and I haven't seen any crawlers or anything unusual in my Google Analytics. The funny thing is, I have two domains that redirect to the same blog, and I only received this email for one of them.
It's a beauty blog, so I often link to beauty products. Is that the problem? Do I have to go back to every single one of my posts from 2013 and take them out? My affiliate links are how I monetize my blog. What is this "nofollow" thing?
It is interesting how Google keeps trying new ways of doing this. In the past when Google penalized sites for buying links, people that were guilty could try to claim they "cannot control who links to them". Which by the way is a good argument, and so now by going after the sites with outbound links Google does not like, it takes away this argument. In this Google forum (above) the penalized site owner asks if there are tools to determine which links are bad. There are a few and they are horrible, do not use them. SearchEngineLand wrote an article about this, that I tore to pieces for being one of the stupidest and dumbest SEO tools ever created. This is why SearchEngineLand is only good for SEO news and not for SEO advice.
I also have to blame and call Google out again for poor implementation and making it difficult for webmasters to follow Google Guidelines.
What exactly do I mean?
In Blogger only in the main posts can you "add" a no-follow tag. So if like most people they want to comply with Google Guidelines they cannot easily do so. It seems very unfair that Google penalizes non-technical website owners when Google's own product does a terrible job of making it easy to comply with Google guidelines. So Google should partially blame themselves. Of course if Blogger makes all the link creation features the same and offers a no-follow option for every link created in Blogger, like they should have done years ago, instead Blogger will continue with it's crappy software quality control and break ten other features that currently work when they add two new capabilities in Blogger. The $5,000,000,000 toy that is not ready for professional use. Google really misses the boat sometimes, Google Plus and Blogger are good examples of products Google should perhaps discontinue if they cannot hire people that can do a better job. My company built a Content Management System (CMS) that has zero defects in basic text editing and content creation. Where Blogger has over 20+ serious defects and no one at Blogger/Google knows how to fix them or that they even exist. Sometimes when I use Blogger I want to scream out at the Blogger developers, "Why are you torturing me with your defect product?".
These are reasons Google should should look in the mirror and blame themselves.
Please look at the screen shot below, it is just one of several examples of where Google's own product does not let the content creator easily comply with Google guidelines. Where is the ability to give this a no-follow tag?
All Bloggers widgets should look and work the same as the blog posts do. You should be able to open a page in a new window and allow a no-follow tag if desired.
This just shows that their is no one at Google/Blogger that is in charge of the "big picture", perhaps it is a Google cultural problem, they are too socialistic in their management style. Sometimes I wonder if Google is really just a one hit wonder. I mean they came up with the greatest business idea of all time when they created the Google search engine, so really how can anything beat that. Now Google seems just like an average company even worse than normal when it comes to software quality control, and really taking a passion to make their products perfect like Steve Jobs would do.
