Sparks of Controversy. There was a substantial amount of controversy in the WebProWorld forums regarding what Marissa Mayer, the Director of Consumer Web Products at Google, told me at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago last week. She said, “If you dropped in rankings, go back and look at who you linked to and who’s linking to you. If any of these people are using spam techniques, they're the reason your site no longer appears on Google.”
The subject of controversy here, as you can probably guess, is whether Google really is penalizing websites based on what sites are linking to them – a factor that is often beyond the control of website owners. This is a concern because if Google uses this method to determine a site's rank then your competitors could easily sabotage your site's ranking by linking to you from spam sites.
Due to the brevity of our interview (I was literally walking Marissa to her taxi) I didn’t have a chance to ask her to clarify her statement. That's why I called Danny today.
Danny says… Danny Sullivan is editor of
http://SearchEngineWatch.com and also organized and moderated the Search Engine Strategies Conference. I asked his opinion on Marissa’s comment regarding what readers should do if their sites drop significantly on Google.
“I saw that headline summary in
SearchEngineGuide, if I remember correctly, and I noticed that it freaked some people out,” Danny replied. “I remember [Marissa] saying that because it sounded really significant, but I took Marissa’s comment slightly different. I think what she probably meant was not that who’s linking to you can hurt you – the reason why is because it’s very easy for you to hurt your competitors. That’s why it’s a terrible thing to use for relevancy. What I do think happened is [Google is] looking at links in a different fashion. If you’ve been in a neighborhood that’s been helping you previously, [it] might not be helping you now.”
Danny says that doesn’t necessarily mean Google is penalizing you for inbound links. It just means that those links aren’t counting as much towards your Google ranking.
Is Google getting smarter? Don’t be surprised if you notice Google getting smarter about links. “In the past, every single link was counted for something,” Danny says. “Perhaps now Google’s still looking at the links but not counting them as much. They’re perhaps not giving you as much credit as they used to.”
Won’t You Be My Google Neighbor? Danny believes Marissa’s comment was misinterpreted, and he thinks there’s another question at hand here. “I guess it comes back to: does the community have more of an influence now than in the past? I suppose so. On one hand, yes, but on the other hand, Google may simply be redefining how it determines a community and what that community is worth. [Google] has always looked at who’s linking to you… I think it’s still doing that, but it’s using a different scoring method…”
So was it all just a misunderstanding? Danny thinks so. “I honestly don’t think she’s lying,” he says, noting that Marissa is a very credible representative of Google. “Marissa is a wonderful resource. She’s really, really good, but she doesn’t deal with the webmaster side as much.”
Danny believes that Marissa knows what she’s talking about but perhaps she didn’t choose her words correctly.
What did she mean, then?
“I think what she probably meant was that who links to you counts, and yes, that’s always been the case, but who links to you doesn’t count as much as it did in the past.”
Who Gets Penalized? Is the penalty completely out of the question? Probably not. “If Google were penalizing sites for getting links, then that is a significant repercussion,” Danny says. “I have no doubt that in some cases [Google] might penalize, but the criteria would be really high.” Danny could understand a site getting penalized “if you’re running fifty websites that have no reason to exist other than linking to themselves or if [Google] sees other stuff that makes them think, ‘These links are odd! Not only should we not count these links, but we should do something to this website, period!’”
”It’s too easy to make mistakes.” But as far as the everyday link exchange, that’s innocent enough in his eyes. When it comes to link exchanges, “it’s too easy to make mistakes,” Danny says. And he believes the people who run Google understand that. After all, they are only human!
Danny Sullivan Explains Google Penalties
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