SEO Traffic Lab
This will almost certainly have been a case of receiving a warning message within Webmaster Tools and I am sure that the SEO’s for Interflora have been running around like chickens to get these paid for links removed
(PRWEB UK) 12 March 2013
Following on with what is now becoming the norm and not just clearly a passing phase Google has once again dished out some quite severe penalties to various organisations for continuing to use techniques that we have all been clearly warned about in the past.
Firstly the industry saw several dozen UK operated newspapers and news sites have their PageRank scores downgraded. It appears that the reasoning for this penalty by Google is large scale selling of links. When you consider that this was an action taken as far back as 2007 when Google first went on record saying that this kind of business action could effectively hurt your PageRank it is surprising that these major concerns have continued to flaunt this practice, especially after Google followed up their warning in 2007 by actually applying this penalty to several US news sites.
What did come as a surprise to many, was the severity of the penalty with Google not only lowering the score but actually setting many of them to a PageRank of zero, this is the first instance where they have taken such a harsh action as they normally will penalise with a drop in score of a couple of places such as 2 or 3.
As if this wasn’t warning enough Google then proceeded to penalise Interflora as well, the reasoning behind this it would appear is for buying these types of links and taking out so called ‘advertorials’ an example of which can be seen here and as you can see the news sites PageRank is also at zero.
Andrew Birkitt, Head of Technical at SEO Traffic Lab says “Google have been warning all businesses and SEO’s for a number of years that the selling and buying of links that pass Page Rank are in breach of their ‘Quality Guidleines’ and they have even taken measures to re-iterate this as recently as the 22nd of February on their Webmaster Central Blog. So it really comes as no surprise that these penalties have been so harsh”.
“This will almost certainly have been a case of receiving a warning message within Webmaster Tools and I am sure that the SEO’s for Interflora have been running around like chickens to get these paid for links removed or at the least have the rel=”nofollow” added to the paid link so that it is no longer passing PageRank” he added.
Ultimately the moral is that Google are showing that they will no longer just take prisoners, but that they mean to win the war against these sorts of tactics and that the bigger you are the harder you will fall.
About SEO Traffic Lab
SEO Traffic Lab is an SEO company based in Lincolnshire with offices in London and Lincolnshire, dedicated to raising the online awareness, visibility and profitability of businesses through the use of new media. The company deliver SEO Services and Online Marketing that bring customers closer to your business, offering a bespoke service for every client covering Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click, Social Media Management & Brand Reputation Management Services.