Google Penalty Triggers - how to get my own site penalized for marketing experiment?

[n0tSEO]

Yes, you didn't read it wrong. :)

I'm trying to get one of my sites penalized for a psychology and marketing case study.

The real challenge is to find triggers that will get my site penalized quickly without ruining user experience.

Basically, I want my users to continue being happy around my site while Google shakes head.

So far I implemented the following techniques:

• Copy/pasted the entire list of keywords from WMT into the footer under a display:none paragraph
  
• Added 2 hidden links to other sites I own that were already penalized and I used crappy anchor texts for them, like 'cheap pay day loans', etc.

I haven't tried anything else and I don't want to go post comment spam, because that will annoy and hurt other people.

Any ideas/suggestions on how to trigger a penalty under these conditions?

Thank you!

P.S. Thanks for checking this with me, brotherhood_of_lan!

[Sand]

Cloaking. Show the regular content to users, and pharma spam links to Googlebot. Your users won't have a negative experience because they won't see the spam.

I've had clients who were hacked with this type of cloaking, and they were knocked out of the search results within days. Once I cleaned things up for them, their rankings returned within a couple weeks.

So with this method, you could still meet the goal of your case study without doing long-term harm to your site (probably) since Google will most likely assume you've been hacked and will restore the rankings once the 'hack' has been fixed.

[rish3]

If you want a manual review, post some spammy backlinks in the comments section of a personal blog owned by a Google employee.

Edit: maybe post the urls bare so you get past automated spam filtering :)

[n0tSEO]

Thank you, Sand. Cloaking might work.

rish3 - I'd rather not use comment spam that would ruin my site's reputation or annoy people. Thanks anyway! :)

I'll post updates as they come.

[Shepherd]

I think I understand what you're trying to do here: you want to show that google gets it wrong by having a site that visitors love but google won't rank.

Well if that's the case, cloaking, in my opinion, would give google an out since google would "not" be ranking something your visitors never see.

Here's a list of manual actions from google:

Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
Unnatural links to your site
Unnatural links from your site
Hacked site
Thin content with little or no added value
Pure spam
User-generated spam
Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects
Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing
Spammy freehosts
Spammy structured markup

So, unnatural links to your site. You stated you don't want to add links to other people's site but you did mention you owned a few other sites, maybe some spammy links from those sites to the project site. Lots of them, all keyword anchor text.

UGC. This is something you can do on your site.

Spammy structured markup. Also something you can do on your site.

[bsand715]

Very interesting nOtSEO. Keep us informed how it plays out.
IMHO based on what I am seeing in real life SERPS

"Thin content with little or no added value"

Might get you a top 5 ranking :)

[netmeg]

You want an actual manual penalty, or just get it to drop?

If I were doing this, I might create a side section out of the way of the real users, and load it up with a bunch of scraped content. Like a whole bunch. Like a lot.

[n0tSEO]

@Shepherd -

The case study is more to reassure webmasters that a Google penalty is not the end of the world and that a website is not doomed just because it got a nay from the search giant.

But like you say, one of the messages will be also that Google, like every company, has a bias toward its products and purposes, so the last word on a site's fate always, always remains in the hands of the webmaster, not in Google's (or Bing's, or Yahoo!'s, etc.).

I feel it's important to dispel the 'myth' so that people can look at these things rationally and don't fall into 'worshipping' mode, so to speak. It's dangerous (and I've seen enough talks about closing 15-years old business, contemplating suicide, etc. around the Web).

Some news: I have put up a spoof site with junk text and spammy links directed to the project site.

@bsand715 -

Ahaha! You are right. :)

I'm considering netmeg's advice to create a spammy/scraped side section hidden from the site users.

@netmet -

A manual penalty would be better in my case, but even an algorithmic drop would serve the cause (depends on what Google wants to use on the case).

I will definitely keep you updated. Thanks for your help!

[Carleenp]

You could try adding a ton of spammy anchor text tags to the posts. You don't have to make them visible to visitors, just make sure they are all in the site map.