Hold on to your hats boys and girls, but Goolge has done it again. Have you checked your page rank lately? How about your search engine position? .... (pause to allow time for those who opened windows and are doing the checking) ....
Yep! Time to rework and re-connect to site and for some re-think their strategy. In particular those that have paid links and advertising with certain key places and some paid link or paid content might want to review their net strategy.
"Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results. We enjoy working with webmasters, and an added benefit of our working together is that when you make better and more accessible content, the internet, as well as our index, improves. This in turn allows us to deliver more relevant search results to users.
If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines."
It goes on from there, but bottomline, Google won't stand for (at least not without being paid for it too) false advertisement (i.e. PayPerPost), or false links and link farms that might be used to ultimately boost one's position.
The unfortunate thing is that there really are 6 degrees to Kevin Bacon (or however many degrees it is) and I'm sure we all have some link on someone's site who has a link on someone else's site who... ultimately utilizes a link farm or other such tool that will be penalizing our sites as well (read below).
(from comment section) - In the Kevin Bacon reference, I was referring to your linking partner's page rank going down as a result of them using a link-bait or paid link system. Since their page rank goes down, the relevance of the links point to your site go down and therefore could push your page rank down, unbeknownst to you. You do not receive an outright penalty as one commenter pointed out.
It seems we're always at the mercy of Google. They're becoming the new Microsoft.
Mobile Notary Review
Paid links aren't going anywhere... you just have to do it Ninja Style
Text-Link-Ads and PayPerPost are obviously not following the Ninja way.
Also, you do not receive penalties due to who is linking to you. Otherwise people would just start linking their competitors right out of the index.
GITA BANTWAL, REALTOR BUCKS COUNTY, PA HOMES - It's important to keep your strategy content centric and you'll be fine.
Gene Allen Realtor® Virginia Beach - You can never give up, at least I can't. However, you can change strategies. Page Rank and this article are more about paid link placements as opposed to strict SEO.
David Kyle, Charlotte SEO - Thanks for the post. It's not a penalty, and perhaps I should reword it. However, the page rank you see today, may go down and it may very well be that the other linking sites that went to you were using a link bait system, and their page rank went down, so thus your page rank will suffer as well. Thanks for pointing out the miscommunication.
Anthony Fico - Wow you receive phone calls from Google?! That is out of the ordinary from my experience. I get calls ABOUT google or yahoo, but never from Google or Yahoo. People trying to sell me something I can buy direct.
Eleanor Thorne - I'm assuming you're talking about adwords, but this article isn't so much about adwords.
Thanks for the tip, Joshua. You scared me into checking my google ranking so I did a test search. Thank goodness I am still appearing 5 times on page one. Whew!
You are right, Joshua. Google has become even snobbier than before. It is no longer important to Google that I am the most popular girl in school (all the directories list me and all my fans link to me). Google wants me to be known by the most popular sites in the US (ActiveRain, CraigsList).
90%+ of my new clients find me on Google or another search engine. (The rest find me via referrals.) I know what words to put on my website and in my AR and CraigsList listings because I always ask my clients what words they used in a search. Virtually all tell me the same two words. One of them is the name of my town.
I am low tech. I don't even use a visitor counter. But I get on page 1 of Google five times even though there are 500+ competitors in my town. I focus on Keyword use, submission to Dmoz and other url submission sites, and posting on AR and CraigsList.
My answer to out-smarting Google? Stay human.
My site was dropped a couple of places down but it is back where it was again. It is difficult to understrand how google actually ranks web sites.
Jay
Very intresting... I'm stil tryong to just keep up ith all this... I feel like I'm so far behind !