NEW Google penalty over the weekend...
Sam Freeman
Brand Partnerships, Banking & Finance @ TikTok | ex-Twitter ex-Universal Music
That's right folks...following on from my last post about why links are still being banded around as a dirty word, Google goes and takes manual action to punish those people still trying to manipulate the Google algorithm.
The new update actually targets websites that are linking out in an unnatural way. This would include the likes of blogs that publish 'collaborative' posts for businesses in exchange for free products or for monetary compensation.
In an email sent to webmasters of the offending site, here's what Google said:
"If you see this message on the Manual Actions page, it means that Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to the affected portions of your site. Actions that affect your whole site are listed under Site-wide matches. Actions that affect only part of your site and/or some incoming links to your site are listed under Partial matches."
Here's a screen grab of the message that cropped up in the Search Console of offending sites posted up by Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land yesterday:
It's not yet known whether sites with the inbound links from these sites have been directly effected by this update however, in our opinion it's likely these sites will suffer in their own right as a result.
This update reinforces the fact that (to my amazement) there are still companies out there buying 'follow links' in order to manipulate rankings. I've come across several very high profile businesses across many sectors with these kinds of rel="follow" links in recent weeks so for safety's sake check your link profile to avoid being hit by a manual or algorithmic penalty!
If you're unsure, get in touch with your site details and i'll take a look for you:
Further reading from Google: Unnatural links from your site