Google Reminds Webmasters about Selling Links

Scandal rippled across the web in February when Interflora plummeted in the rankings for its own name.

The company also dropped for the word ‘flowers’, a word that it had previously ranked in the coveted number one spot. SEOs sank their teeth into the challenge of finding out why they had taken the hit.

So What Happened?

There are several ways that Google calculates the way pages are ranked, many of which they have not revealed, but it’s now been collectively asserted that it was the way that Interflora has been getting links that caused the drop. Interflora was cheating at Google’s game (a game that no one knows the rules for until they are punished for doing something wrong) and paying for links. Their SEO team seem to have been prepared for this eventuality and has been trying to remove the paid links that they have obtained.

What have Google Said?

Google has since issued a reminder on its official blog, like a parent making an example of a child, that violating their quality guidelines is not acceptable, and that they will penalise those who do.

Without mentioning Interflora, Google’s post advises that you should be wary if you are approached to buy or sell links or advertorial pages on your site that pass PageRank. The intention of manipulating PageRank is frowned upon heavily by Google, and so should be avoided at all costs.
To avoid this, you should remove any paid links or advertorial pages or make sure that any paid hyperlinks have the rel=”nofollow” attribute. Doing this will prevent loss of trust, lowering the PageRank in the Google Toolbar and lowering rankings.  Google’s quality guidelines reiterate that content should be unique and valuable.

Google’s focus remains on rewarding web pages that are aimed at humans and not search engines and sites that don’t use any tricks to improve or manipulate search engine rankings; and punishing those that do.

This shows that Google is as willing to punish big brands as well as smaller companies whose ranking won’t get as noticed as much. However, after only eleven days it appears that Interflora is back up and slowly regaining its rankings. This begs the question, how did they manage to bounce back to easily?