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I've heard many people this month (more than most I think, and some with a lot of credibility) complaining that their high PR sites have been relegated a few pages down from their previous number one slots for certain terms.
It appears last August that Google did implement some kind of filter to stop the Google Bomb from working. If that is the case then they must have implemented some test to prevent the link anchor text from having an impact at some stage. But at what stage is it, and is there a SERPs penalty applied to sites that have too many other sites linking to them all with the same link anchor text?
When most of us get link requests we probably send back the anchor text we would like. I suspect that often this is the same text. For example I sell blue widgets, so I ask people who want to link to me to use "blue widgets" as the anchor text.
But Google doesn't know if they are Google bombing me or satisfying my request. So does Google implement a filter to prevent the bomb? If it does how many links or what equation is used to separate out a bomb from a genuine innocent link?
Like some others I have a high PR site that has dropped a couple of pages this month for no good reason I can think of, except it has a heap of other sites linking to it, all with the same anchor text. It kept its PR, but dropped considerably in SERPs. Not for all searches, but certainly for the ones where a lot of others are linked using the search term as anchor text.
The sites above didn't gain PR, most didn't even change in anyway I can see from the HTML source. So the only explanation I can come up with is I have an invisable penalty for having too many other sites linking to me with the same anchor text. The penalty is actually Google trying to prevent the Google bombing of my site :(
If this is true it might also be the answer to the Google statement that there is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm a site. Maybe if you Google Bomb a competitive site with enough links and their primary keywords as anchor text you can harm them? If so it would be ironic, the only way to harm a site would be to do the one thing most SEO's believe would improve their position.
I have a little more evidence in this area. For a completely different site, one of my competitors in the Web Design field uses their logo and link on every site they design and the same anchor text link. In Novemeber they suddenly dropped 30 positions in the SERP's for the common term they use for anchor text. At the time I was happy to see them fall, but now I am wondering if they got hit by the same problem of having too many sites with the same link anchor text and Google thought they were being bombed!
If anyone knows what parameters (like the maximum number or percentage of same anchor texts links before a Google Bomb detection trips) are actually applied in this area I would appeciate some knowledge :)
In the meantime I am thinking of getting the anchor text changed in some of my link partners to see if that helps, I am probably already too late for next month, unless another deep crawl occurs :(
1. Vary the anchor text a bit. "fuzzy blue widgets" across all inbound links is likely to be problematical. Make 70% of them "fuzzy blue widgets," and split up the remaining 30% between "blue widgets that are fuzzy" and "blue fuzzy widgets."
2. If possible, arrange to have the keyword phrase repeated in the context of a paragraph, with no more than a few words separating the anchor text containing the keywords and the phrase as used in a sentence. In other words, instead of just getting a link, get a paragraph with the keyword phrases close together.
3. If possible, arrange for the keyword phrase to appear in the title tag and in headline text of the page which contains the inbound link. In most cases, where you don't actually control that page, this is very unlikely to happen, but it would be very useful. But if that site operator is friendly to you, perhaps he or she would set you up with a whole page (hopefully with some useful PR) that you can optimize for its full value as a link source. This would be more valuable, I think, than just a simple link -- IF the page has some decent PR. The link to that "gift page" need not be very easily located. ;)
Probably you will find this to be an effective approach. Good luck. :)
Search for "best viewed" (with or without quotes) and the IE home page comes up #1. Look at the cache and you get:
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: best viewed
So I believe that in general anchor text still counts.
Usually, the term describes 'promoting' someone else under uncomplimentary words, but the potential for SEO is pretty clear.
If they did penalize for too many links of the same word, then this would be yet another potential way other webmasters could hurt your rankings.
The "go to hell" Google bomb they are refering to was from a couple years ago, when a bunch of webmasters put a link to Microsoft on their websites with "go to hell" as the link text. So, after a while, when someone would search Google for "go to hell", Microsoft was the 1st result.
tee-hee! Web people are so funny. :)
Ted
and AOL ranked #3
;)
Let's say 50,000 incoming links contain the words software, Microsoft, Windows, etc. along with any other related terms.
If 200 incoming links "only" contain words that have never been related to the words typically associated with Microsoft, then ignore them.
This isn't foolproof, especially on smaller-scale sites, where "bomb" links have the chance to outweigh relevant links. Unless, Google built some sort of history method that charted all related terms to a site and tracked them from there.
Beachboy,
This is something I've observed but have been unable to confirm. Think I'd also through in keywords in the page's url.
Seems to crop up quite often when we talk about one of those weird pages that rank very highly without any discernable content and very few links. But the links come from pages with the keyword phrase in areas noted above.
Is this another part of the off-page algo?
Jim
I will guess that the bomb algo goes like this:
Are words in link also on the page? (Also use google's "related words" technology to see if the link text is compatible with the page text, even if the actual words are not on the page.) If yes, stop. If no, continue.
Are words in link also in many other links on many other sites? If yes, stop. If no, continue. (Eliminates Yahoo problem.)
At this point you have ID'ed likely bombs. Exactly how Google continues is anyone's guess, but (if I had google's data) I'd also look at whether the bomb suspects are cross linking more than expected. If yes=bomb.
I've been using Beachboy's method for years, and I think it works. My reasoning at the time was that google seemed to be discounting affiliate links, and I suspected that they ID'd affiliate links because they are often identical. I think today Google likes affiliate links ok, but I still do it. It looks more natural and that's bound to have benefits off and on.
all my incoming links have the same anchor text and I had never problems. I don't thin it is a good idea to penalise sites only the because they always use the same anchor text. For example big company sites like microsoft.com have 100.000 of links looking like <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/">microsoft.com</A>
Í think it would be too dificult to filter out these sites from sites using it for SEO.
This article [wired.com] will explain the concept in greater detail.
It's been going on for quite some time. And I haven't seen anything that suggests they've come up with a fix for it.
One of our keywords has gone from number 2 to nowhere,
but other pages using different keywords have remained the
same.
We do have a large number of links with the keywords as
anchor text, but it is also in the headers/title and
in page text.
My question is has anyone managed to get their page back
after getting this penalty? If I change some of the links
will my page return to top 10?
If as someone suggested this is a manual penalty, then
it could take a long time to remove, and I may be better
starting with a new domain and hosting.
Any suggestions welcome!
TM
I have the same questions:
1) Has anyone managed to get their page back
after getting this penalty?
2) If I change some of the links
will my page return to top 10?
I'm not an expert, but I think it would be stupid turn for google...
e.g.
How would people link to a specific page "red box"? Nobody would bothered to have a look how many pages link to the page like this <a href="redbox.com">red box</a> and if there are many pages linking like that, I think, nobody would waste time by thinking of any better link.
It would be also able to hurt pages with high PR.
If google does penalise for "Link Anchor Text - Google Bomb" it has to be very difficult algo and not just comparing text in links.
btw - sorry my english, hopefully you understand
The 'go to hell' fix was almost certainly a manual one.
To filter 'bombs' manually would somewhat undermine the basis of their algo since linktext is certainly a very large component. I think this is one that is best done manually, and I think it will continue to be done that way.
You can be certain that their are some 'checks and balances' in regards to 'google bombs', but I don't think their have been enough instances that have had a decidedly negative effect to warrant automated attention.
Other pages on the site with other keywords are still
at no.1 position. The common factor appears to be all
pages with a certain phrase have gone off the radar,
while others have remain the same.
Good_vibes
How long have you had this penalty?
I am coming to the conclusion that I will have
to use my `backup domain` to get the pages back.
This would mean contacting a lot of link partners
and asking then to change the URL, but hopefully
I can sort it before the next deep crawl.
In future I will be changing the anchor text on
regular basis, to avoid this happening again.
TM
It's unlogically, no!? IMHO a reason to reduce the relevancy of "anchor text keywords" would be if the anchor text is nowhere else found at your page and NOT if it reflects your title, headlines or content.
What other factors can suddenly burn a page?
It is not just one page but several, all containing
the keyword phrase which is the exact anchor text.
All other pages (over 200) are unaffected.
Surely if there was another reason for penalty,
then those pages would have been affected as well?
TM
That's by far no proof.
>We do have a large number of links with the keywords
>as anchor text, but it is also in the headers/title and
>in page text.
What about the incoming links from external sites? Do you have enough with "the keywords" in anchor text?
The page in question is PR5, has been ranked no.2 in
google for 2 or 3 months.
It has 600 + backlinks showing in google, and at least
100 have the `affected` keywords in `anchor text`.
Suddenly it disappeared yesterday, but other pages
that have not got affected keyword on page/title or links
are unaffected.
Other pages that use the same keyword phrase in the site have also disappeared.
I hope you are right and it is something else, but
I cannot think what!
TM
Maybe we should wait for the next update, see how that looks, and go from there, but I personally don't see any evidence for an algo change of this kind.
And tennismaster, are the 100 with the same link text from 100 different sites, or are they spread thinner, like 4 each from 25 sites? You get the picture.
Last year when the big PR0 penalty hit, I noticed that there could be a drop for sites that weren't penalized, but *seemed* like some of the links were being disregarded as though they didn't exist. Looking at one site as an example, there was a drop in PR and it appeared that instead of several links from sites being counted only one from the sites was being counted, which would account for the PR drop.
What I'm wondering if this is indicating the existence of an actual penalty, or a temporary tweak that's just disregarding certain things - like more than a certain number of occurrences of identical link text and watching to see the effects. Kind of like lab rats. ;)
