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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.
Its unfortunate that many unsuspecting participants are going to also be caught up in the filter. I guess you can say, "see, we told you so!"
Why would someone want to name a page themeindex.htm anyway? If I were setting up a filter for a file name, and saw this particular name, I would assume that 99.5% of where that file name is used falls under the criteria of the filter.
>link communities like this
It depends on how you define link community and how you define directory. Where is the blurred gray line that separates one from the other?
>Why would someone want to name a page themeindex.htm anyway?
Their choice, and they should not be collectively penalized for exercizing their right of choice.
>Its unfortunate that many unsuspecting participants are going to also be caught up in the filter.
Here is the real crux of the matter, all the innocents that are being caught in the wash. There is the tragedy.
Onya
Woz
Have you actually looked at those link pages? Can someone explain to me how a consumer would find these of benefit?
What concerns me is that when the penalty was on, sites were easily identifiable. Now that it's been lifted for the most part on a lot (but no doubt not forgotten) there's a risk with people linking to them unknowingly. If all penalties should end up being reinstated, a lot of people could be hurt without having had any indication.
Exactly! The whole idea of penalising a site simply because of a link and the implied intentions behind that link presupposes that search engines have found a way to get inside webmaster's heads via their spidering software. Next Stop - Star Trek!
It is an old and wise adage that states "If you have nothing good to say, then say nothing."
As has been stated within these fora by a good many people, there should not be any penalties. If the engines are at all suspicious about a particular link/action/software/whatever, they should simply ignore any effect that link/whatever would have, not meter out penalties.
Too many innocent people are being hurt!
</getting off soap box>
Onya
Woz
Woz, I think what is happening is Googlebot is getting smarter on each crawl. It realizes that imposing penalties on an entire website because of certain shared links is not a viable alternative to cleaning up the index. For one, it gives Googlebot a black eye each time a specific group of websites falls prey to some filter adjustment.
Giving PR0 to link farms is Google's way of saying they don't work. Now, whether or not the source that was PR0'd is a link farm is where the gray area is.
We, meaning myself and a few others have been following backwards links the past 30 days on over 241 websites all relative to the SEO/SEM industry. We've found some very interesting things going on with link communities and PageRank. I can tell you that 9 out of 10 of those link communities had PR0. When looking at the structure of those communities, most had one thing in common.
I think when we have the time available, we'll put a list of things together that we have found relative to link communities and the websites that link to those. Since most sites do not link back to the farm, there is nothing to worry about. Its the ones who get in the ring that find themselves in jeopardy.
I think Google is on the prowl and is fishing out these types of properties. Actually, its not fishing them out, but, putting them so far downstream that they become worthless. Just another 10,000 pages of links taking up space on Server #85 back in a corner somewhere.
Every single page in the linking ring had PR0. Any sites that were in the database are not being affected as Googlebot is totally ignoring all outgoing links from these properties.
I'd be willing to bet that the next crawl targets sites that are promoting the service. This means all of those who have set up the themeindex.htm or .html may get penalized. Right now the penalty is focused, maybe a warning shot?
Hey stephenha, great find! We've also got some interesting facts to share as soon as we can confirm them on the next major update.
Sure, some were the generic themeindex-type pages showing 20 to 30 categories of link pages.
But many had already contracted their links categories down to only topics that were reasonably pertinent, kept clean of 404s, with a majority of outgoing links being non-reciprocated.
And there were totally innocent bystanders too, such as sites about movies, where the "theme" (or genre) of the movies was the reason they named their page "themeindex".
A penalty against "themeindex.htm" in a URL seems much too simplistic. A company like Google could write an algorithm to investigate such pages more thoroughly, to see if they actually link to offensively huge link collections.
However, looking at "/links/themeindex.html" shows 100% (out of the first 80 or so) that are quite Zeus-ish looking.
Perhaps Google was thinking that if they PR0'd the themeindex, then the PR of the actual link pages themselves would have to accrue solely from incoming links to those individual pages. I can't see anything wrong or spammy about themeindex pages, in-and-of themselves. (They are un-interesting, but not offensive.)
I feel very unsettled about this. On non-penalized sites, PageRank flows internally in a kind of circulation. Incoming-from-external links to the homepage, flows PageRank downward through the hierarchy to deeper pages, which generally re-circulates back up through "back to the index" type links. But if a "themeindex" page gets a PR0, it probably acts like a "PR sinkhole" that indirectly depresses PR on everything else, by blocking the re-circulation effect. Could someone with a PR simulator maybe check if that hypothesis is valid?
Could this be the tip of the iceberg? Might there be other penalties applied on individual links pages, when certain Zeus-default phrases appear?
I wouldn't worry about the "PR sinkhole"; this kind of behaviour seems to work as if the links weren't there at all. Even at worst, the small amount of non-recirculated PR wouldn't be noticeable in terms of rankings.
-----------------
Good observation. A quick check does show some sites where they named that page for that reason.
Uninteresting, irrelevant, of no use, of no benefit, not worthy, devoid of interest.
After reviewing quite a few of those sites in the ring, I totally agree with your statement. The only value of those pages is to attempt to artificially increase link popularity. There is no question in my mind about it, or Googlebots for that matter.
How they came up with the file name themeindex.htm is beyond me. Maybe someone did some extensive research and said, hey, here is a file name that Google wouldn't think of penalizing. Look at all the high quality sites that use it. This is a perfect opportunity to launch our initiative.
Bottom line, that whole community is nothing but one big Link Farm. There may be a few viable pages within the mix but 99% of them are uninteresting.
In the past, ( though not in the last year, I admit), I researched some obscure topics, and was happy to find some link pages ( using Zeus style ) that were helpful. But I'd estimate that 90-95% of individual Zeus link pages aren't in that unique-obscure-helpful category. And it was annoying 90% of the time, to have individual zeus-generated links pages appear in search results.
Fairness. Is the penalty fair to the guy at fishbustercharters.com who puts pictures of fishes in his link pages? Or carbonmonoxidekills.com which has a small resource of links?
I still think the penalty mechanism is too simplistic and with a little more effort, it could be tuned to be more selective. They'll have to do it sooner or later, now that the cat is out of the bag about "themeindex".
If the penalty mechanism has also been indirectly suppressing the rankings of pure content pages in the penalized sites, that would be really unfair, because Google's communications about liabilities from Zeus, haven't been very clear, have they.
Search engines tend to cater to the sites which have money (either to pay for optimization or directly to the engines). That does not by any means cater to what surfers want - sites which give them the information that they need. To illustrate, there is an incredible amount of useful information and materials available on personal sites (even on free hosts), yet these are often ignored by search engines, or pushed way down in the listings. Yet these sites often give surfers exactly what they want.
That's why webrings and other systems have evolved - search engines cater to business. This has NOTHING to do with the purpose of the internet, which is communication and information.
The vast majority of surfers have absolutely no interest in purchasing anything. That's probably the main reason why the dot coms failed. Surfers want data.
Richard Lowe
That leaves the less-educated, less-professional webmasters who have become the penalty recipients.
It reminds me of Government-sponsored Gambling and Lotteries, which is like a "tax on the stupid people". This Google penalty has a similar feel to it.
By the way, it occurs to me that this represents an enormous research opportunity for someone. We have a very big cohort of penalized sites that are easily identifiable. Seeing how these sites clean themselves up, and how long it takes to recover, could provide a great insight.
Ditto for linking to a site penalized for any reason - most small site operators don't surf with their Google toolbar on to check PR. They see a site that might exchange links, and contact them.
It seems to me that the whole penalty idea (and the surrounding secrecy, non-response to e-mails, etc.) is bogus. If you identify an obvious spam site and a tech confirms it, fine - but let's not completely turn off traffic for sites that aren't spammers, or offer legitimate sites no opportunity for redemption even if they did run afoul of some past filtering effort.
I can tell you that if you are using any sort of link generating software, be careful, we are seeing a lot of the big names in that industry getting PR0'd. As with the themeindex, the outgoing links are being ignored so there does not seem to be a penalty for those who are listed. We have followed links within those communities, onsite, and all the pages are PR0.
I think Google has assigned a team to review this current issue. There is too much at stake to impose a global penalty for everyone participating. Basically what they are doing, is PR0'ing the main community. If they PR0 the source, then there is no appeal to the participant. I'd say its a very effective approach. Start at the top and work your way down.
Watch out ring members, they could be working their way down now. That is just an educated guess based on this topic and also our own research.
> the only pages that are affected by the PR0 penalty are the link pages.
Sounds like this is what we're looking at here - Google says these pages shouldn't be passing on any PageRank, but they're leaving the rest of the site's PR alone and just "ignoring any effect that link would have" by not having it distribute PR.
Site-wide PR0 has other factors involved. I'd guess that domain farms play into it pretty heavily, not just link communities.
So let's take a quick look at exactly what Zeus is giving us, then perhaps somebody can explain why it's so bad. Initially you give Zeus a bunch of relevant, on topic keywords (yes like the ones that you use on your cloaked doorway pages), and you point him to a site that has hopefully got some outgoing links on it. Zeus follows those links and checks a few pages of the crawled web site to see if the site uses the supplied keywords i.e. if it's on topic. Each on topic site that is found is added to a list that has 2 purposes, it is used by Zeus as a source of further sites to check out and it is also used by the Zeus user as a list of possible links. So Zeus goes on its merry way, suggesting heaps of possible sites of interest, and the user spends days or weeks sifting through the list, discarding 90% of them, and sending emails to the rest suggesting that a reciprocal link might be set up. Now surely we all agree that the internet was built on the ability to link from one site to another, and that Google page rank is built on this feature. Hopefully, we might also agree that so far Zeus has done nothing except to automate a very lengthy process....I thought that was one of the prime uses of computers....I'm obviously mistaken !!.
That's the way that I've used Zeus, it took a huge number of hours to get those reciprocal links, and I was foolish enough to let Zeus correlate the results and build the pages for me, something that turned out to be a bad decision, but only because of a totally irrational and knee-jerk reaction from Google.
Let's now look at what the "bad" people have tried to do with Zeus. Instead of building on-topic links they've tried to build another version of the ODP, they've got bunches of links to totally unrelated sites. Even that shouldn't upset Google....hell they're simply giving away what little PR they had. What has actually happened is that their random web crawling and email sending has resulted in them getting a few totally unrelated reciprocal links. Now we know that Google's not keen on this, but remember these people are the hicks of the web, they don't read these forums, they've simply seen the blurb from the Zeus people and have gone full steam ahead with all guns blazing. Google in their infinite wisdom have spied this little nut and taken a huge sledge hammer to crack it. They can't find a way to identify the huge players, many of them SEO's that frequent this board, with their carefully crafted sets of in-house sites producing inflated link pop, so they've hammered a bunch of amateur sites that were simply trying to attract a few more visitors.
<sarcasm> Another victory for the big guys....Go Google !! </sarcasm>
</rant>
You're absolutely right and I humbly apologise to the forum. It's actually one person who's posted a few times.....the red mist came down and I engaged fingers before brain !!
Ross
I think when you look at stevenha's posts #11 and 12 he hits it on the head and I think your post is very concise and not all too hot. It is a good little tool if used properly to help cut down a time consuming endeavor. Anything that makes it a little shorter is always appreciated. You seem to be one who has used it to help you and not as another method for abuse. Unfortunately it would appear that a large number of people have used it to attempt to scam PR. One would think that if google has seemingly addressed it that it is a larger problem than we might be able to appreciate.
only imho
However, what really burns me up is search engines making decisions about my site based upon wooden rules. To me it's a real pleasure coming across a site with a nicely chosen set of links. I prefer that links be spread through a site on appropriate pages instead of on "links pages". To me, that's the way the internet is supposed to work. Articles can refer to other articles as needed.
Even more of a pleasure is running across a site with a very well run webring (or webrings). These can be extremely wonderful for surfers when well maintained.
So while obvious link farms might pose a problem for google, I think that webmasters should be allowed to add them if they desire. Why? Because surfers will chose, with their clicks and return visits, what they want and don't want. And I will tell you, a site with an obvious Zeus directory (or linkstoyou or any of the other ones) tends to turn off surfers. Too many of these kinds of things, and the site will become naturally abandoned. On the other hand, a carefully maintained, well crafted set of zeus pages will give visitors value and encourage them to return.
Richard Lowe
So while obvious link farms might pose a problem for google, I think that webmasters should be allowed to add them if they desire. Why? Because surfers will chose, with their clicks and return visits, what they want and don't want. And I will tell you, a site with an obvious Zeus directory (or linkstoyou or any of the other ones) tends to turn off surfers. Too many of these kinds of things, and the site will become naturally abandoned. On the other hand, a carefully maintained, well crafted set of zeus pages will give visitors value and encourage them to return.
That paragraph represents such a serious misunderstanding of how search engines work that it's painful to read.
Any search engine that just threw crappy, abandoned Zeus sites at users (and forced users to wade through them and figure out which ones were crap) has failed at an engine's main mission: finding good, relevant results. People use search engines so they won't have to see the bad sites.
And repeating something that seems to be my personal refrain lately: Google is not the Web. 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.
Also, upon rereading these posts that this is precisely what google is attempting to do. If what they are doing is simply "throwing away" the link pages altogether, then I have no argument at all.
The philosophy that comes to mind is Google should consider link pages and perhaps webrings as an alternative method of navigation through the internet, and thus should simply ignore them.
Richard Lowe
Richard Lowe
