Google Bowling or Penalties - time to choose

after reading Greg Boser's recent blog touching on the subject of google bowling I was itching to say this.. I'm sure it's been talked about before but what other options do Google have? If they start penalizing/banning for a highly concentrated number of new IBLs, even the biggest sites have to worry about the smaller guys cashing in their life savings to take them down. It'll be interesting to see how this one pans out.

interesting thought - forget DOS attacks, lobby groups will GoogleBowl large corporations out of Google to get their point across.

but I'd expect that being English you'd have a much better grasp of literature, some quotes from Catch 22 wouldn't go astray :-)

who's English?

erm.. Nick?

There's plenty of commentary around concerning Matt Cutt's recent talks in Vegas where he indicated that the paid link networks were not doing any good in the rankings. He also indicated IIRC that they weren't hurting, just not helping.

So there is a third option. Crappy links don't get you penalized, they just don't count towards your rankings.

My uninformed two cents is that this is exactly what Google is or should be doing. Don't penalize, just don't credit. That fixes Google bowling. And it also lets us advertise where we want without being penalized.

I understand that this leaves the door open to button pushers, the fix to that is to look at other factors that indicate button pushers at work.

>Crappy links don't get you penalized, they just don't count towards your rankings.

this might not be the case in a relative-based system, which IMHO google uses to some extent. i.e. #of good links / # of overall links = quality of site. all you have to do is increase the denominator without increasing the numerator, and you have google bowling.

so bad links might not directly penalize, but in a value system based on relativity, they kind of do.

>Crappy links don't get you penalized, they just don't count towards your rankings.

My observation is exactly this - I personally think Google are wrong to presume that link manipulation is inherently wrong, but I have great respect for how they are re-evaluating links via algo tweaks of various parameters, rather than through arbitrary human judgements that could obviously seem unfair.

The bottom line is that links can still help, but they work differently to how they did 2 years ago, and it's becoming more and more the case that link quality is more important than link quantity.

Crap links can still work, and quantity won't kill your site - but value links in small number can beat raw volume.

they are re-evaluating links via algo tweaks of various parameters, rather than through arbitrary human judgements that could obviously seem unfair.

Humans create the links.
Humans create the search algorithms.
Humans review the seed sites for stuff like Trustrank, etc.

...it's easy (and cheap) to hide behind the algo.

Add to that the undoubtedly numerous ways to tweak and bypass the "algo" and there you go.

BTW I kinda like the concept of googlebowling. It's risky...

It is a penalty. Take a site ranking on page 2 or 3 and buy yourself a thousand or so links from a network with the same anchor text. Watch that ranking tumble.

Don't penalize, just don't credit. That fixes Google bowling. And it also lets us advertise where we want without being penalized.

Makes perfect sense and I agree wholeheartedly -- except for past actions Google and other SEs have taken against such link networks.

Starting back in '99 such networks were all the rage, though then targeted mostly at Inktomi and Alta Vista, as Google was just a gleam on a Stanford hard drive back then. Problems started to crop up in 2000 when it was perceived that SEs were starting to take action.

Brett ran one of the largest networks, Buddy Links. When he closed it down that June he stated:

Inktomi does not ban people, but they do bury you in the rankings.

Then Google came along.

Another popular network was LinkTopics, started sometime around early 2000. It became apparent by late 2000, early 2001 that Google was very skeptical of this network and was starting to take action against it -- sites were dropping like flies, gray bars became very common.

After GoogleGuy became a regular at WmW he specifically cited -- a number of times -- Buddy Links and LinkTopics as reasons for sites being banned. That sites were banned because of their participation was basically confirmed to me by Matt Cutts at pubcon Boston in 2003.

(Fairness: Brett always strongly states that no sites were ever banned by G because of the Buddy Links program. I'm just passing on what GG has stated to be one of the reasons. Of course, with WmW out of the index, I can't find the specific threads now. They were sometime back in 2002.)

So, Google in the past has, instead of just discounting such links, banned sites participating in such programs. Whether the bans were algorithmic or by hand I don't know. The lifting of a 1 1/2 year ban in 2003 on my main site at the time was by hand.

Now the question is: Would Google take the same actions today, ban or heavily penalize sites instead of just discounting questionable links, and, in the process, accept a certain amount of collateral damage? I'm just not sure.

Google has never had a problem throwing out the baby with the bath water. They know that a small percent will try and do this, but for the most part, it will remain incredibly minimal. It seems tricky to trigger a penalty, so if you really invested in knocking out a competitor, you are risking actually helping them.

I'm just passing on what GG has stated to be one of the reasons. Of course, with WmW out of the index, I can't find the specific threads now. They were sometime back in 2002

Gigablast points to this. Any use?

Yep, that's one of them. Thanks, I'll look under the sofa first next time ;)

There were quite a few others around the same time frame where GG was able to out the reasons for a site's ban.

miserable failure

Notice the #1 adwords result on this search? ( "determined pranksters", I love it. )

IMO... Good links still work the way they used too, it's how links are weighted that has changed and become more complex.