Google’s latest Round of Penalties

Over the past couple of weeks some popular and notable sites have taken a hit in the Google Page Rank pocket. I say pocket because these are sites that were selling links. Who got hit? Some very popular sites including Forbes.com, searchengineguide.com and problogger.com. So why the penalty? Google does not like sites that sell links to artificially inflate their link popularity.

After an initial round of penalties a lot of SEO companies were crying the blues because their client’s sites were penalized and lost Page Rank. Just when they were starting to think that the storm had passed Google slapped a penalty on another round of sites. This time Google went after sites that are involved in blog linking schemes.

This is what Google’s Webmaster Guidelines have to say about it.

“Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”

So why do SEO companies put their client’s sites in harms way? Because buying links and doing massive blog posts are the fastest and easiest way to generate links.

The truth is that it takes time and effort to create a solid linking campaign. No site should be totally dependent on one or two sources for links. A mixture of blog posts, social bookmarks, articles, press releases, directories and even reciprocal links are a among a best practices plan for long term success.