Google Penalty vs. being Blocked and GrayBar

This article was updated on 10-5-08

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 of the page.

Now this is where I question some of the subjective decisions Google makes and I also question why they come to the conclusions they do. E.g. how can Google be sure that the PR9 page is not showing paid links? Or maybe the form of payment is not in cash, it could be in other things like free trips or organization sponsorships. I do not think this is happening in this particular case, however how would I or anyone know 100% for sure?

Than Google does give a penalty to Accessify.com, when it is not 100% certain they are selling outbound links. Also if you look at other sites the w3.org PR9 page links to, there are questionable items on some of these pages. So in my opinion this can lead to a "witch hunt", and with Google penalizing so many sites for paid links many webmasters are afraid to give out any links at all. I do not think this is what Google intended by giving out all these penalties, however it is a negative side effect. I also think this is a tough problem for Google because they do not want to penalize innocent webmasters, however I have seen several cases of Google incorrectly and unfairly penalizing some web sites.

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If you want to read more about if you should buy text links and what the risks are and what the "safe ways" are to perform Google approved link building please read this article:
http://www.htpcompany.com/google-pagerank-buy-sell-ads.htm

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The way w3.org gives the outbound links 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.com site at PR5. Generally Google will keep this penalty on a site until the site requests the penalty be 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 seroundtable.com to a PR4, for selling paid "Sponsored Links".

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

Regarding the Google toolbar and what the graybar means. In the past the graybar was the kiss of death. The worst and most serious penality you could receive from Google, even worse than PR0.
Today is not true that graybar (greybar - British spelling) is the worst penalty, 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.

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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.
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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/

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.