{"id":8772,"date":"2015-06-10T12:39:52","date_gmt":"2015-06-10T09:39:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/?p=8772"},"modified":"2018-07-10T12:17:59","modified_gmt":"2018-07-10T09:17:59","slug":"google-just-penalize-100m-investment-thumbtack-case-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/8772\/google-just-penalize-100m-investment-thumbtack-case-study\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Google Just Penalize Its Own $100M Investment? The Thumbtack Case Study + 6 Day Recovery Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

Update: 15th June 2015<\/strong>\u00a0:<\/span> Penalty Recovery in 6 Days –\u00a0<\/strong><\/span>Thumbtack rankings seem to have recovered after only 6 days of penalty.<\/p>\n

You can skip<\/a> the Penalty Analysis if you are interested in\u00a0the Recovery Analysis only.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is the very interesting penalty and surprisingly fast recovery story<\/strong> of Thumbtack, an online platform that allows service providers and consumers to find each other and negotiate jobs online. We don’t know if it has something to do with its swift rankings recovery or not, but incidentally, Thumbtack benefit of a massive $100 million investment led by Google Capital in 2014.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thumbtack is a consumer service for finding and hiring local professionals, a marketplace that connects consumers with local service professionals such as photographers, yoga instructors and bartenders. What Thumbtack does is allow service providers and consumers to find each other and negotiate jobs online. What kicked off as a garage start up at the beginning of 2009, developed to have over 50,000 service providers signed up on the website in 2010 and has grown to over 240,000 service providers by January 2012.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"\"<\/p>\n

We always keep an eye on the big search engine in order to keep you and ourselves updated with the newest findings in digital marketing. Being watchful with what happens with the major search engines, we are among the first to spot interesting and dramatic penalties, from famous banks<\/a> to big brands from the travel industry<\/a>. Regarding Thumbtack, aside the fact that it\u2019s a very successful business we are talking about, what is interesting is the fact that a massive $100 million investment was led by Google Capital in 2014. This, in itself, is nothing unusual. What makes it so is that the project \u00a0led by Google Capital begs the question: will Google punish a site if they have their hands in its pocket? It certainly looks like they will.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"Thumbtack<\/p>\n

Currently Thumbtack doesn\u2019t rank for their own brand name, nor does it rank for the 25,000 keywords they used to rank. As a site which connects lawyers to customers, massage therapists to people with back problems, wedding photographers with soon-to-be-newlyweds, Thumbtack ranks for all sorts of keywords, from bolts and drill presses to marketing and yoga. Given the site\u2019s profile, there is (or should be) nothing shady about that. The problem is that they weren\u2019t just ranking on \u201evarious\u201d keywords, they were ranking on mostly commercial ones, such as \u201cbest photographer Ohio\u201d, \u201ccheap dentist\u201d and so on.<\/p>\n

Official Announcement of Google Traffic Drop<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Thumbtack recently apologized to their users on their blog<\/a> for the low number of visits from customers. They referenced Google traffic as a potential issue and promised to fix the issue. There is no certain way to verify that this is a penalty case, but the numbers in our analysis surely seem to indicate so.<\/p>\n

\"thumbtack_official_announce\"<\/p>\n

A further sign that we\u2019re dealing with a complicated matter is that none of their blog posts has any comments or shares \u2013 kind of weird for a website with 35,000 referring domains.<\/p>\n

\n

And besides, how many websites brag about a penalty\u2026 voluntarily?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"thumbtack_ref_domains\"<\/p>\n

$1mil Rankings Value – Pre Penalty<\/h3>\n

One of the reasons this case is so interesting is that this is not just any run of the mill scheming scenario. On the one hand, this is tied to Google Capital. On the other hand, the ranking value (pre-penalty) was estimated at around 1 million dollars. How do you get to that value with so many commercial keywords and so little organic activity?<\/p>\n

\n

Most of the value of Thumbtack stays in its traffic. Most of it seems to be coming from Google and since they were penalized their entire value dropped.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"thumbtack_rankings_value_pre_penalty\"<\/p>\n

Thumbtack Shady Link Tactics<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Well, one way to get to that high point is to ask your users to include a link to your website on their own sites. In return, users get points, which in turn help them rank higher in Google. A classic tit-for-tat strategy. Is it legal though? That\u2019s what one of the users asked on Twitter. Thumbtack said yes, because there\u2019s no financial exchange. Google, however, begged to differ, perhaps because while no actual money was exchanged, the transaction was still commercial in nature. As you can see from the screenshot below, taken from a blog post<\/a> that tackles the same appealing subject, Thumbtack’s website wasn’t very shy in what concerns its link building tactics.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"thumbtack_shady_tactics\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

The bottom line is that if you receive or give any good or service in return for a link, then that link is considered unnatural.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say that a company selling frying pans sends one of their products to 100 cooking bloggers, encouraging them to write about the frying pan they received as a gift. Will Google consider the links bloggers will generate as unnatural? It will surely do. But if the frying pans company wants to stay on Google\u2019s good side, they have to prove that they didn\u2019t have the intention of manipulating their rankings. Thereby, they should ask the bloggers to mark the links as nofollow so they cannot pass PageRank.<\/p>\n

cognitiveSEO\u2019s Penalty Validation<\/strong><\/h3>\n

It\u2019s fairly clear that what they did had a high chance of being considered foul play by Google. Did the search engine actually act on this by applying a penalty? There\u2019s no way to positively confirm, as we haven’t seen the penalty message itself, but we can definitely infer with a high degree of certainty based on facts. So instead of using the word \u201cpenalty\u201d, let us, for now, refer to \u201cthe incident\u201d.<\/p>\n

We looked at the rankings on 917 top words from Thumbtack before and after the presumed penalty. Before the incident, for most keywords their site ranks in the top 20 and a lot even in the top 10 search results. And the keywords are not really all that of a niche. \u201catlanta personal injury lawyer\u201d, \u201cHouston movers\u201d or \u201ccarpet cleaning Denver\u201d all seem like fairly sought after keywords which might entice quite a bit of competition. Good on Thumbtack, then, right?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"thumbtack_before_penalty\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yet after the incident, the shift in ranking is visible to the naked eye. 113 of the analyzed keywords don\u2019t rank at all anymore (that\u2019s 12% of the sample). Out of the rest, no keyword ranks above the 40th position. The probability of this happening from \u201cnatural\u201d causes or even algorithm changes that were not specifically targeted at them is fairly close to zero. It\u2019s safe to say, by looking at the numbers, that \u201cthe incident\u201d was, in fact, a penalty.<\/p>\n

\"thumbtack_after_penalty\"<\/p>\n

Thumbtack Brand Search Volume<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Normally, penalties are bad for business. But the online world is a tricky one. Just because Thumbtack may have been unorthodox in some of its practices does not automatically mean it only had dissatisfied customers. In fact, a lot of them had to be pretty satisfied with the site. That would be the only way to explain why the number of search for their website only increased after the penalty. People were looking specifically to find the Thumbtack website and when it didn\u2019t show up for any of the keywords (there are no results after the third page of Google results, remember?) they kept on searching.<\/p>\n

\"thumbtack_trends\"<\/p>\n

This implies that at least some people (their users included) were quite content with Thumbtack\u2019s services and were perhaps doing a search on a keyword but hoping to find this specific site where they once found a solution to their queries.<\/p>\n

\n

Perhaps an illustration of the \u00a0Streisand effect<\/a>: the more you try to remove something from the forefront of the web, the more it tends to be brought back there by the very act of removal.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Though in Thumbtack\u2019s case, this might not be that helpful: their site is still buried in the depths of Google hell (i.e. beyond the first page of results), meaning that search as they might, at least some loyal fans might have to abandon all hope and look somewhere else.<\/p>\n

Why Were They Hit By a Manual Links Penalty<\/strong><\/h3>\n

So what prompted Google\u2019s reaction now? At the time of the penalty, Thumbtack\u2019s ratio of unnatural to natural links was pretty much out of balance. 58% of the links could be considered unnatural, with a further 14% being considered as suspect. This left only 28% of their links showing up as OK. With less than a third of your total number of links being sound the penalty was probably inevitable at some point.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"thumbtack_unnatural_links\"<\/p>\n

This was not an accidental situation, but was rather indicative of a faulty business model. Moreover, a lot of the unnatural links were traced back to instances of low authority and thin content posts, not to mention heavy presence on web directories and blogs. Admittedly, their business is of such nature that a variety of domains and ubiquitous presence was unavoidable, but that hardly explains the disproportionate prevalence of commercial anchor text, clearly noticeable in the visualization below.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"thumbtack_commercial_anchor_text\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Thumbtack Link Building Story<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Thumbtack\u2019s link profile largely tells the story of how they got here. A combination of blogs, personal sites and web directories is not indicative of a strong and healthy presence. Add to that the fact that most of these entries were short paragraphs or texts or simply images and it becomes clear why this model was not sustainable in today\u2019s Google\u2019s world.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"thumbtack_link_story\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To add insult to injury, we even found cases of SEO marketing \u2013 really shady instances of blog comments with thin content and large quantities of anchor text. By all accounts this is one case where the penalty seems justified.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Thumbtack is based on a bazaar model<\/a>, where users can find everything and anything and the site is just the middle-person.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"thumbtack_marketing\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So maybe they could have brought this to their defense to justify their hectic web presence? Maybe, but then someone more careful (and well-intended) might have had a more sensible do-follow to no-follow distribution. But with a 9:1 Do-follow to No-follow distribution, there\u2019s even more evidence that their heart wasn\u2019t necessarily in the right place.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"thumbtack_dofollow_distribution\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Not only are most of their links do-follow, but most of their image widgets are do-follow as well. This takes us right into the \u201cknew about it and planned it\u201d territory. Sure, a lot of the evidence for this claim is circumstantial. But when enough of it gathers, it\u2019s pretty difficult to still assume good intent.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"thumbtack_dofollow_widget_unnatural_links\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The closer you look, the more obvious it becomes that what we see in the analysis was part of a strategy, not the result of carelessness. To add just one more example, look at the anchor link in the two instances below.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"thumbtack_chicago_locksmith\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Same keyword, obvious commercial intent and no actual content. There\u2019s really no good alternative explanation to the obvious one: the strategy here was based on an antiquated vision of what SEO is and how it works. And after a while, all these cases amass and pop up as unnatural links.<\/p>\n

\"thumbtack_chicago_locksmith_example\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Doubtful\u00a0& Ultra Fast Recovery Story<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\u00a0<\/h3>\n

How much does it usually take for a site to recover? Depends. From our researches and our clients’ experience<\/span><\/a>\u00a0 it may take a couple of weeks, a month or more. Google does not give a fixed timeframe or a maximum limit and very fast recoveries are usually myths. Also, from what we knew so far, there is no way through which you can influence the Google Penalty Recovery<\/a> process externally. Or at least this is what we thought. Well, Thumbtack might prove us wrong. Most of the site (until today, we would have said that “all sites”), after they\u2019ve completed the whole process would impatiently wait for one of the three different replies:<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n