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The homepages of these penalized sites DIDN'T have PR0, but their PR seemed lower than a typical random sampling of websites.
As many of you know, "themeindex.htm" is the default links page URL of Zeus-generated link directories. But a good number of these "themeindex.htm" pages had nothing to do with Zeus... they were bystander victims of what appears to be a cruel secret penalty.
I can't claim credit for making this observation, but it seemed rather important to bring up for open discussion... so there you have it.
Google isn't telling anybody they can't have Zeus directories, they're telling them that Zeus directories won't help them in Google's database.
As Richlowe notes, when webmasters start removing legitimate content (or preventing Google from indexing it) because they fear penalties, something is wrong.
I understand your concern, Richard, but what made Google different was its recursive link popularity method. People subvert it; Google responds. It isn't too surprising if the penalty is, to some extent, recursive. It shows that Google consider this problem to be bigger than the guestbook problem, where they had a much lighter "poison word" penalty earlier this year, that I believe worked in the way people are suggesting in this thread.
It's a real shame when someone who runs a worthy and well respected site gets caught up in this, just as it's a shame when people who do the right thing for providing non-visual access to their site get penalised. The best that we can do here it guide people away from danger and towards safety; for me that means advising against using some kinds of linking (and some filenames). It might seem "holier than thou", but we don't live in a perfect world so we need to find imperfect solutions to imperfect situations.
1) Ignore (or apply PR0 to) content that appears objectionable (e.g., a suspect links directory) when detected rather than automatically penalizing the entire site. Legitimate site owners might lose some content in the index, but wouldn't lose everything.
2) If penalties are applied, have an automatic removal process when whatever caused the penalty is corrected or removed.
3) Respond to e-mails from site owners, or, if the issue is manpower, even offer a fee-based expedited site check.
If Google were a second-tier engine, these weird penalties would be no big deal. With their current market share, though, they need to step up to the responsibility that comes with being the major player.
Wars have innocent bystanders who get nuked just because they are in the wrong spot. I think that's exactly what is happening. The vast majority of websites are run by good, honest people whose only desire is to say something and be heard by some people (or to make an honest living).
It seems to me that this majority is being harmed (severely due to Google's market share) by the acts of a few misguided or even evil souls.
I don't spam search engines. I have used Zeus in the past because I wanted (and still want) to guide my visitors to resources which might be of benefit to them. I trade links with other sites because I feel my site may be of benefit to THEIR visitors, and thus two sites of similar topics can help each other.
I use ALT tags because of accessability and because of the tool tip feature. I use meta description because I want a nice description in the search engines (including my own PERL version). I use meta keywords to help catagorize my pages to research sites and research related search engines. I use meta PICs to inform browsers that my site is family oriented. I have started titling all of my tables because that helps screen readers. I've started using the various LINK tag options to define my site structure to external agents.
I've got a very well defined site map because it helps my visitors. I've got "what's new" pages for the same reasons.
I join webrings because these are a way to build internet communities and to receive (and give) highly targeted traffic.
I use several viral marketing techniques including ecards, tell-a-friend scripts and so on to advertise my site.
I maintain four newsletters (all double-opt-in) to keep people informed.
And on and on.
None of this has anything to do with search engines. It has to do with making my site more useful to people.
I shouldn't be penalized for any of this. This is what the internet and web is all about. Communication. Community. Making an honest living. Increasing one's ability to connect with other people and places.
And that's my objection to the route chosen by Google - it appears, on the surface at least, to discourage honest webmasters and to even penalize them. It's kind of like making rules that say no one can swim in this lake because someone dumped trash in a lake in another county. I like the approach of catching and penalizing the few people who dump trash into lakes instead of discouraging swimming altogether.
And I have no objection to getting educated on those things that DO effect my page rank. Thanks to all of you who have done so. I just wanted to take the opportunity to make my own point of view on the matter known.
Richard Lowe
Don't need to even look at it. It can be judged by the amount of spam it generated last year. For awhile last fall, it was 50-100 zeus generated spams in the inbox a day.
It was an interesting and unique product. Unfortunatly, they tied it in with an autospamer routine that ticked everyone off.
Richard Lowe
they tied it in with an autospamer routine that ticked everyone off.
I think you are right, Brett - most of the negative comments about Zeus here at WMW have been from people who got tons of irrelevant link requests using identical wording. It isn't quite autospam - each site has to be reviewed and categorized - but in the hands of a dumb operator Zeus does make it pretty easy to send out lots of dumb e-mails. Usually, the dumb e-mails lead you to an equally dumb collection of unrelated links.
Taking the war analogy, innocent bystanders are inevitable. You can't get rid of a lot of spam without loosing a few non-spammers who happen to exhibit similar features to the spammers. I'm not suggesting that it's good or that it's right, just that it is.
I checked these 4 examples, and couldn't find any particular common denominator. Two had robots.txt files, but they didn't exclude googlebot from their links. One used frames, two had some extra javascript, but one looked pretty standard. Apparently there are more examples. (But finding them would be very tedious.. finding a needle in a haystack.)
Perhaps I drew the wrong conclusion. Or maybe there are other explanations?... The trouble is, I don't have the list of sites exempted from the penalty, and if I did, I'd be afraid to post them, in case it drew further scrutiny to them.
But I will say this, the examples I saw, looked as Zeus-ish as any others, having LOTS of links pages. I don't think they were exempted from the penalty because of an obvious quality superiority.
Google's reputation is good, and I can't imagine that they would exempt sites randomly, just so a rule couldn't be proved.
There is an underlying message here. One that has surfaced many times in the past. For those of us who have followed this industry since its inception, we've seen automated tools come and go.
Every single one of them was conceptualized to make our jobs easier in promoting our websites. And, many of those programs worked during that phase of the Internet.
The problem is, with automation, comes laziness. With automation comes excessiveness. With automation comes abuse.
The lazy excessive abusers end up taking a once viable resource for some, and turning it into something of little to no worth. Its the one bad apple ruins the whole bunch thing.
In this case, it appears to be guilt by association. If you've ever been part of a peaceful protest and a few decide to not be so peaceful and you just happen to be right next to them, you can fully understand the guilt by association thing.
Machine generated gateway pages were once the thing for webmasters to do. Every little mom and pop website purchased a program, read a few lines from the help file and then started generating the pages in abusive manners. AV put a stop to that a few years ago, it was a very bold move on their part and it opened a few eyes.
Now, all those webmasters needed a way to track those thousands of gateway pages that they generated. Okay, let us load hundreds, if not thousands of keywords into the program and see where our 1,000 pages rank. Google has been trying to put a stop to this and has effectively done so in those cases where the use is abusive.
Automatic submission programs are another area of our industry that has come under major fire. With the major SE's moving to paid models, the automated submission tools have become mostly archaic. There are a few that are well maintained that may be of use to some. Your every day blaster to hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of resources is a typical scam and a lot of people are making money on these. Unfortunately the consumer is the victim. AV again put a stop to this with their Ransom Note feature. Others have blocked submissions from a variety of online tools that are used for auto submitting.
The same thing is now happening with the automation of link reciprocation. It was an immediate response to Google's PageRank concept and it worked in the beginning. But now, the abuse has begun and Google is effectively trying to stop it before it becomes too rampant. Based on what I'm finding, its rampant! And it is not just the program(s) mentioned in this thread, its 99% of them that are out there.
Automation is a wonderful thing in this day and age of technology. I feel there are certain things that you just cannot automate and expect to maintain a high level of quality. Most of these programs are developed without careful consideration to growth and changes in the industry. If the program works for six months, great, everyone wins in the short term. Its the long term implications that many fail to think about.
Anytime you automate something to do with the search engines and influencing their results, you are asking for trouble. The industry is changing rapidly. I'm seeing a shift back to the grass roots of the web, quality content, proper structure and traditional promotional methods.
In today's marketplace, the little guy does not stand much of a chance against the big players. But, if the little guy spends a little bit of time educating himself on what to do and what not to do and wants to budget a little bit of money for paid placement, he can survive. If the little guy builds a website that has good content, that people are looking for, he can survive.
Ha, in a perfect world that would be great! But, we do not live in a perfect world. The little guy has to resort to strategies that provide an immediate fix because he can't survive with a long term solution nor does he have the time to educate himself about Internet marketing.
There will always be a need for automation in any industry. If the source of that automation does not set the ground rules for use of the equipment, program, etc., it will be abused. To the point where we see things like what this thread is discussing.
What's really interesting is what Google is doing with the sources of these automated tools. Take a quick peek at the PR of most popular automated tool sites, the ones that have come under fire. There is a trend taking place and when the other SE's follow suit, these boards will be flooded with complaints!
Unfortunately innocent participants are going to be penalized. Those who do not stay in tune with industry trends will find themselves without visitors to their websites. Its all about knowledge, those with it, will continue to survive, those without it, will not.
If I read between the lines with what is happening, Google may be starting at the source and may be working its way to all of the branches supporting that source. Its like a plague, once you are infected, you need to innoculate quickly. If you don't, the outcome will not be to your liking.
My main comment is I believe it would be better to facilitate the "good" instead of trying to "obstruct the bad".
It's a basic difference in philosophy. People are basically good and usually have good intentions. In the vast majority of instances, when someone does wrong it's because they didn't understand the consequences to others or some basic concept. Educate them and they will cease the bad behavior.
By making it easier for people to be good, people will tend to be good.
People who create websites want to get traffic (otherwise why do it at all). The means to get traffic are not well defined by any means (in fact, they really do not even rate as high as "poorly defined"). Because of this lack (and the perceived lack), people tend to be very susceptable to fads and scams.
I agree with many of the writers on these forums. One of the basic issues is there is no easy, well defined, known way to communicate with the engines, nor do the engines communicate with the user community very well.
Sites often have no idea they are not appearing in engines (or in other places). Even if they do get a glimmering that they are not, they have no clue why. And if they do figure it out, how do they fix it? And then, how do they get the engines to recognize that it be fixed?
Perhaps what's needed is a direct communication method. Perhaps a small file (similar to robots) or meta tags or something like that which tells the search engines "I want to be in the search engines, I want to be notified if there is an issue with my site, and here's how you get hold of me". This could be a way to register your contact information and URL directly with the engine as well (to make it tougher for spammers to grab the email addresses).
Now, if the engines found an issue they could automatically send an email to the webmaster saying "hey, your site was highly ranked, but now I've decided to lower it because you've broken the rules. Here's what you did, here's a suggestion or two to fix it, and here's how you inform me (the search engine) that the repair has been done so your site can be rechecked."
An engine could totally automate this entire process. Say it determined that a site was using cloaking. The engine would send an email to the webmaster. The webmaster would either fix the issue and resubmit his site for automatic review or appeal the issue (there are many valid reasons for cloaking which have nothing to do with search engines).
That's just one thought.
Other thoughts?
Richard Lowe
Furthermore, stevenha mentions reports that some non-Zeus sites that happened to use that filename were also zapped. I didn't attempt to verify this, but bad luck for them if true, eh?
It seems to be an inescapable conclusion that Zeus sites have been targeted by Google, most likely using some kind of automated approach.
Here's the problem. Matt Cutts, Google "Engineer and Spam Czar", has been quoted as reassuring Zeus users that they are not being targeted. The only risk, he notes, is that linking to spam sites IS dangerous, and that any program that finds links for you could "amplify" the possibility of linking to one or more bad sites.
The unique penalization of sites that incorporate the themeindex file (while other similar sites escape the same fate) suggests the opposite of what Mr. Cutts states. It looks as if penalties are NOT being made based on linkage to bad sites, or on the quality of a site, but rather on the peculiar signature of one tool.
To give Google the benefit of the doubt, perhaps there are some low-level coders doing stuff with the algorithm and filtering that Cutts doesn't know about. At the same time, with Google's relatively compact organization, it seems unlikely that the Spam Czar wouldn't have a clue about this.
I'll be interested to see how this gets resolved.
If these sites aren't trying to artificially boost their link popularity this shouldn't be a problem for them...
Besides after some of the zeus directories that I saw... I don't blame Google for not giving them any weight in the algo...
I guess I have a problem with singling out any tool (rather than the individual page/site content), and an even bigger problem with saying one thing and doing something else. If Zeus is inherently bad, come out and say so, and then restore the PR to sites that remove Zeus content.
On the other hand, I also found several PR0 sites that I could not find anything wrong with to have a PR0, such as university sites...
Hmmm...
In the other thread, about "themeindex.htm", I just posted a reply saying that some exceptions to the rule have been found... so my assertion/hypothesis about the penalty is not absolutely 100% provable. ( Ie, if I'm not 100% correct, I guess that makes it "wrong".)
To recap, it appears that URLs ending in themeindex.htm or themeindex.html result in a localized PR0 to the offending page.. but not in 100% of cases.
But back to the issue of and Google's (Matt Cutts) public reassurance that Zeus-specific penalities wouldn't be applied. Maybe the wording should be checked, to see of some careful wordsmithing was at work.
I'm not sure why a few themeindex.htm pages didn't get PR0, but I took a quick spin through some of the larger sites in the Zeus collective and, in that small sample, found 100% correlation between the use of themeindex.htm and PR0. I also looked deeper and found a few of these sites that exhibited the "low PR" syndrome; I won't mention the URL here, but one of these was the oldest, "flagship" Zeus site often cited as a demo - it had PR4 on the home page and PR0 everywhere else I looked. According to comments posted on the Zeus site, the Zeus author had made a special effort to clean this directory up - eliminating 404s, adding more structure, tightening the focus, etc. His comments from a couple of months ago were encouraging - PR was starting to return after the cleanup effort. As of today, though, that site STILL lacks internal PR.
IMO, we may be looking at a cause & effect here that explains at least a portion of the nagging PR woes some sites are experiencing.
I believe with those it was just lifting the penalty a bit, which is making it hard to distinguish between them and sites that just haven't had the PR altogether.
The real question on my mind is whether this was false reassurance, and whether merely using the software creates a risk factor.
The whole thing reminds me of the whole AV mess a couple years ago. AV swore up and down that they were waging war against poor quality doorway pages, not WPG. But the method they used to locate the pages was flagging pages that contained the now infamous blueline.gif file.
If you copied and pasted WPG's output into your own template that didn't contain the blueline file, the page somehow went from being a "poor quality doorway page" to "valuable content."
Earlier today, I spent some time visiting every single site listed in a stock Zeus link directory that had earned a PR0. If Google's comments were accurate, then I would surely be able to find the specific site that resides on the wrong side of the tracks.
Guess what? not a single site in the directory suffered from a PR0. In fact, they were all very good sites with strong PR.
Regardless of what any search engine says in public, they all use common naming conventions to single out groups of sites that use automated tools to generate content.
> Good reasons not to use zeus?
- Can generate spam.
- May get you banned from some websites and cause grief in your community due to people talking about you.
- People can and do turn in zeus runners to their isp as spammers.
- Does not evaluate the quality of the link.
- Generates leads with little qualifications.
- May harm rankings due to finding banned spammer sites to link with on some se's (link to a spammer, you are a spammer in the eyes of the se's).
> Better way to do recip links?
By hand. Find a high ranking site in the Google directory and do what it takes to get a recip. One good link from a 8-10 page ranked site is worth 800-900 links from a 1 ranked site.
Its amazing how the core concepts of marketing on the Internet still hold true to date.
You've got this amazing knack of making me see red !!
"By hand. Find a high ranking site in the Google directory and do what it takes to get a recip. One good link from a 8-10 page ranked site is worth 800-900 links from a 1 ranked site.
Its amazing how the core concepts of marketing on the Internet still hold true to date."
What you are describing is how best to manipulate your rankings within the Google search engine....not what are the core concepts of marketing on the internet, and certainly not what is best for your customers. Are you saying that they'd prefer to see one link to a PR8 site rather than a choice of 800 on-topic links....of course not....you're telling us what GOOGLE wants to see.....there's a huge difference.
Ross
> By hand. Find a high ranking site in the Google directory and do what it takes to get a recip. One good link from a 8-10 page ranked site is worth 800-900 links from a 1 ranked site.
Those were his words from that thread back in June of 2001. I added the core concepts line afterwards.
Based on what I'm seeing, not only with the directories mentioned, but with other similar ones as well, I don't want any part of it. Never did, never will. I'd rather have a few good links with a few quality resources. They will outperform the 800 on topic links that you are referring to. Now, don't get too red on me. Here's a little Visine, It Gets The Red Out! ;)
P.S. There are other communities that are faced with the same issue. I'm not going to expose the file names, all you need to do is search Google, they are quite obvious, especially when an SEO gets involved with a ring and you are performing "contain the term" searches at Google. We had one submission we declined because this particular company was linked in about 200 of another similar directory concept along with a bunch of others.
Yes, I am saying they'd prefer to see one link to a PR8 site that contains relative content structured in a logical format that is interesting.
I'm not telling you anything. I'm just sharing my experiences with you in hopes of educating the public on what works and what doesn't work. Its not only what Google wants to see, its what all quality search engines want to see. Google has now set the pace and the trend. The rest of them are doing what they can to follow suit.
BTW, what am I going to do with one page of 800 on topic links? Its difficult when there are 20 links on a page!
I've got to agree with Ross on this one.
The statement that Google would prefer to see one PR8 inward link rather than many on topic links from related but lower PR pages is just another way of "gaming" Google.
Imho "the core concepts of marketing on the Internet" is still linking to and recieveing links from, other sites that in an ideal world are closely related to yours. Playing the PR game is just another form of abuse and in my eyes is no better or worse than a Zeus directory.
P1r, I don't dispute that one link from a PR8 page is worth a bunch of links from lowly sites, but only in terms of the Google impact. In fact, I think topic-related links from hundreds of small sites are great - even if each one generates relatively few clicks, the aggregate number will be high and the risk of getting wiped out overnight won't exist. Even if that "one good link" is a great traffic generator, having all your eggs in that one basket is risky. And as far as outbound links, having a few hundred well-categorized links related to your site's topic will be far more useful to visitors than a single link.
There's little doubt that as linkage became more important for search engine rankings (and Google became dominant), many users adopted the software with little regard to creating useful content on their site or even generating traffic via links. That, however, doesn't justify penalizing sites willy-nilly.
I'd probably have a more objective view on the 800 on topic links if they were coming from quality resources. It would take a lot of research, email and communication to acheive 800 on topic links.
I'm sure most us of will present more than one on topic link to our visitors when it comes to linking to third party properties. I was just using one (01) as an example as Brett was in his original message back in June 2001.
I'm not against linking communities, and neither am I for them, I remain neutral, and personally don't use the strategy. They start off being a viable resource and end up being a not so viable resource, or most of them do anyway. I just feel that researching 10, 15, 20 or possibly 30 high quality links far outweighs 800 on topic links from less obscure resources. I understand the weighting factor and that the PR issue is strictly a Google thing.
But, what happens when the other SE's take a similar stance? Our industry is repeating itself. Something like this...
1. Automated program hits the market.
2. Heavy advertising causes the masses to flock and purchase the program.
3. People start to abuse the program.
4. The abusive pages are now reported by someone to the search engines spam unit.
5. The SE's react by incorporating a filter, or placing a sitewide penalty, or in worse case scenarios, a sitewide ban.
6. Those affected come to WebMaster World and other forums to share their grief.
7. Everyone starts removing the offending content from their web properties.
8. We are back to square one, core optimization strategies.
1. Automated program hits the market...
Its a never ending cycle. The SE's make a change, someone figures out a way to capitalize on that change, and we now have temporary fixes to improve our website visibility. Six (06) months later, the plan backfires and now all that work and time invested is wasted.
I think I'd rather spend the time up front and research the long term solutions as opposed to the short term bandaid fixes. Bandaids have a habit of falling off!
To shift the discussion just a bit, where do we go from here? If a site has been affected by the themeindex penalty (assuming that such a penalty exists, which seems quite likely), will removing the content (or blocking it from Google) restore the site's PR? Or is this some kind of ongoing penalty that isn't dependent on the current content?
