After the last few days when every SEO pro, and his dog, wrote about the Interflora penalty, I decided to take a look into the case. What I found out is that, in my opinion, Google seems to enforce another old guideline. That is:
“Advertorials”
Google Advertorial Update Mockup
I ran an indepth analysis on cognitiveSEO for Interflora and some of its top competitors, that are still ranking.Here are some of my findings.
1. The Interflora backlink profile does not look more unnatural, that any of its, still ranking, competitors. They all have low quality links from :
- blogs
- forums
- web-directories
- and tons of other low quality sites that might be considered as being root of this penalty.
Unnatural links are the penalty, obviously, and this is because most of the trust of a site is carried through links, these being the epicenter of any Google ranking. But in this case, Google might try to enforce another existing rule from their guidelines …
“Advertorial Marketing”
If we take in consideration Matt Cutts’ recent affirmation that paid advertorials are to be treated as any other link, based on Google’s quality guidelines, this strengthens my belief even more.
Coincidence? I do not think so. Most of the stuff that Matt Cutts says on his social media accounts is “measured”, taking in consideration that any wrong wording could lead to wrong conclusions made by the SEO industry.
If it is a general low quality links penalty, then why did not Google penalize all of the sites listed here ( plus many more). All of them share a lot of low quality links.
What counts is that now you should think twice before buying an advertorial. Doing it slowly is still ok, but if you do it on large scale you should mark your links as “nofollow” to be able to “fly safe”. It does not matter if your links contain brand or commercial anchor text, they are treated the same. Interflora had a lot of brand anchor text advertorials that got them penalized.
What are you thoughts on this penalty? Is it worth the name of an update?
FAIL: Once again Google reminds us that it will punish its search customers with poor results in order to punish a website!
A search for interflora now results in me finding vouchercodes! Well done Google!!!! I am looking for a website and you send me somewhere else. Idiots!
it depends how you look at it. Google has indeed problems in certain niches with returning not so relevant results. This might also be correlated to the penalites that Google tries to apply. Some of the ranking sites are High Quality but have had not respected the Google Guidelines. Practically Google tries to rank high the sites the respect it and when they remove a lot of “good sites” from a guideline point of view they might remain with low quality ones (from a users points of view) that did not super optimize their SEO and those sites automatically jump in high rankings.
[...] Work for a day or a week. But if you plan for longer than that you have to comply. Read more on the interflora penalty here. [...]
[...] recent example would be the Interflora penalty. Their “advertorial” marketing approach was caught by Google. How they operate was simple: they [...]