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2 years ago, an estate agent acquaintance of my boss was searching on the web for office space in Birmingham on Google. Not surprisingly, he got loads for Birmingham, Alabama but being a UK agent, he needed space in England's second city. Finding almost nothing he realised that perhaps there was an opening for a commercial property website in the UK at which point my boss liking the idea stumped up the cash for a new website.
It focused on properties in Birmingham and surround and the business model was for estate agents to pay for their listing. Over time, the site has expanded and due to the amount of properties on there, we added niche sites for given towns. Each site would have a slimmed down database plus news relevant to this sector and the town.
All was good. If you wanted an office in Derby, we'd be on the first page of Google. Warehouse in Nottingham, same.
This is what Google wants....relevant one-click search. Independent results (all agents can get a free listing of their site if they wish, better rankings they pay for but hey we're not a charity) and above all living in the Uk and looking for Birmingham does not return Alabama.
Story over...the downside.
As we built new geographically focused sites, they were added to the main site under the headline, visit our other sites here....www.xyz.com - for commerciAl property in birmingham....next line www.abc.co.uk for offices in birmingham etc.
They were built With no malice and no wish to manipulate results. Yes it improved our rankings over all but the result of clicking any of those sites was that the browser got what they wanted - it did exactly what it said on the tin and was exactly in keeping with why we built the original site.
Having read webmaster world's forums to death, I now know that come the dark, dark day 3 months ago that we got kicked out of Google, this is why. We cross-linked our own sites - this is a bad thing........
But darker still.
Nearly every site that we link to (We provide our feed of relevant sites to them using the 'niche' sites we have built) has also been banned. They are part of a bad neighbourhood. This includes some development agencies, chambers of commerce etc.
We have now changed the structure of our site to get rid of the long list of domains - it looked messy.
Why, however should I change the look of all of our sites to please Google?
Simple answer they have me by the nuts.
If I don't build a site(s) they like I don't get in....if I lose all of my other sites we lose the ability to feed third party agencies. Similarly we want to list all of our sites somewhere on all of our sites to show the scale we're at so other agencies will see a relevant site/feed they wish to take.
In short, Google's automated system of banning spammers is not intuitive. It takes the good out with the bad and I refer you to the opening paragraph of this message - we built it because no-one could find what they need on Google. Looking now for commerical property anywhere in the UK takes you back to where we were 2 years ago. A few little sites then loads in the US.
Luckily for us as a business, we don't need Google but those looking for the stuff we offer do.
Google is not the internet police. I grant you that people don't need to use Google but given that they have manipulated themselves into a dominant position like Microsoft have, they almost own searching on the internet.
To an extent they are ruining the web and that is sad.
[edited by: the_bfb at 11:44 am (utc) on May 16, 2003]
I don't think a website owner should be able to mass cross-link their own sites in-order to dominate certain keywords/industries
I don't think a search engine should be allowed to operate using an algorithm so poor that mass cross-linked sites do dominate.
No accusations or anything but your sites look very much as though they were put together with maximising SERPS in mind - what is the use for the user of having two sites with the domains keyword-town.co.uk and keyword-town.com, and the other variations that you have? Especially when it all links back to essentially the same business?
I think you may be confusing two things:
- creating sites that users find useful
- creating sites designed to be found in SERPS by users, who will then find the sites useful
You indicate earlier, unless I am mistaken, that you once had the top 26 positions for a certain search. If that was the case, or even if you had a smaller number of different sites pointing back to essentially the same content, that is hardly useful to the searcher, and would rightly be counted as spamming the system - whether or not that was your intention.
On the other hand, if you are selling, say, baseball bats, should you have one site called bestbaseballbats.com with sub-categories for little league bats, aluminum bats, practice bats etc. - or should you have twenty sites like littleleauguebats.com etc. My preference is the former, and I suppose that some of the reason for cross link penalties is to punish this behavior.
You certainly won't be punished because you have separate sites for little-league bats, aluminum bats, practice bats, etc. You may incur a penalty if you link all those sites together. (Google may figure that, if your goal is to provide relevant results for people who want little-league bats, there's no logical reason why you'd link to 20 or 30 other sites about various types of baseball bats unless you were doing it for SEO reasons.) And if your 20 or 30 bat-related sites are essentially duplicates of each other, it's easy to understand why Google might feel that cluttering up its SERPs with 20 or 30 versions of the same site is a disservice to Google users.
As for the original poster's comment:
Why, however should I change the look of all of our sites to please Google?
You don't need to change anything to please Google. You can simply ignore Google, or you ban Google from crawling your site. "Pleasing Google" is necessary only if your business strategy is to rely on Google for referrals and traffic.
Google like to think they have the smartest algos. Well, if they are capable of identifying a group of sites that are crosslinked and don't want them to dominate a search result listing, then all they have to do is limit the number of sites in that group that are returned in a single search.
So in the case discussed, although the top 26 pages may all belong to the same group, Google could limit to, say, 3 the number of these sites that are returned in a single search.
But perhaps, some people at Google just enjoy the power they wield and so would rather trash someone's business than act sensibly.
So in the case discussed, although the top 26 pages may all belong to the same group, Google could limit to, say, 3 the number of these sites that are returned in a single search.
They could, but then there wouldn't be any incentive for Webmasters and companies to avoid shady SEO techniques.
If you look at it from the perspetive of a google searcher looking something that might come up with all your sites, and they aren't looking for real estate, then you might see the problem.
I have no clue about your sites or thed cities, but let us suppose that you have pages on several of the sites that list properties near the "waterfront park" and all your pages have links to "check out properties in birmingham".
The searcher is looking for information on the "birmingham waterfront park" And the first 5 pages in the SERPs are from all your different sites.
Google would start by trying to knock out all the duplicate or near duplicate content pages. Now they see that the other reason that you are ranking so well is that you have cross-linked all sorts of duplicate pages. They just do not have the time to go through and hand clean the mess that you have (inadvertantly) created.
By banning you they have removed some useful results on certain searches, but they have also cleaned up a lot more results.
What will come of this? Several possibilities, only one of which will hurt google in the long run. Everyone switching to other search engines due to lack of relevant results.
What is more likely to happen is that you or someone else will decide that designing your site to be in compliance with what google desires is worth the free traffic that you will get from them.
Think of google as a magazine that offers free ads. To get the free ads you need to meet certain editorial guidelines. They have the right to set these guidelines as they are offering you the ads for free.
I'm sure that google would love to have your sites listed. They want the searchers in all categories to have relevant results. They just don't want you in there if you produce more irrelevant results than relevant results.
In my situation with region.com and links to community1.com, community2.com, etc., my plan is to link to the individual community.com sites from region.com. Before this thread I was leaning towards also having the list of communities on each site, thereby crosslinking, but the consensus is clearly against that.
My goal is not to be 1-15 in the serps, but to do well for each community for their respective keywords, none of which would be the same. Would this derease the risk since I am not trying to dominate for any one specific keyword?
One of these days, Google will probably find themselves in court if they continue to ban sites rather than take sensible measures to fix holes in their pagerank algos.
If the page rank system were as clever as Google would like us to believe, there would be no need to ban sites for cross-linking, etc. If a group of sites can be identified, then the value of links within that group should simply be downgraded.
A good algo would do this inherently (without having to resort to special cases or looking for groups) it therefore follows that Google's algo just isn't good enough.
The issue of duplicate content across sites is more thorny, but as I said before, if a group of sites can be identified, then the number of results from that group can easily be limited (perhaps by a random selection).
My goal is not to be 1-15 in the serps, but to do well for each community for their respective keywords, none of which would be the same. Would this derease the risk since I am not trying to dominate for any one specific keyword?
Not only do you have to avoid it for your chosen keywords, you have to avoid it gur just about any search. that was why I chose the example of "birmingham waterfront park" even if none of the pages had that exact phrase.
I really don't think it is the crosslinking that gets you in trouble in the first place, unless you are part of an organized link farm. I think it is the duplicate content that tends to get people in trouble, the crosslinking just makes it worse and makes you look like a spammer since you are crosslinking duplicate content.
A good algo would do this inherently (without having to resort to special cases or looking for groups) it therefore follows that Google's algo just isn't good enough.
We all look forward to your search engine. When will you have it done?
Seriously, Google is the best we have right now. It has a long way to go before it is perfect. In the mean time they sometimes have to take actions where there are no winners, including google.
I think I should be ok. Even though each domain delivers different content, it is related. The thought never had anything to do with seo. I asked a few experts on these boards to check it out and they all told me I should be fine, but I still owrry about the future and would love a little more assurance that we won't have to change our way of designing sites to match google's needs. On the other hand, google has to do the best they can and they are trying hard in that. So I'm not mad at them for their algo.
I really don't think it is the crosslinking that gets you in trouble in the first place, unless you are part of an organized link farm. I think it is the duplicate content that tends to get people in trouble, the crosslinking just makes it worse and makes you look like a spammer since you are crosslinking duplicate content.
I really don't think ...
I think it is ...
But nobody knows for sure and the goalposts can move from month to month.
I've got lots of sites that link together, related stuff but not all the same...and its very disturbing to think that by doing too good of a job of this you risk being banned from google.
very disturbing.
How do you link your sites together? Does every page have links to all your other sites? That's not very useful site design for your users. If those sites are so closly related that it makes sense to do that, why not just put them under one domain.
I have actuallyu found that if you think about all of google's suggestions, that following them actually helps me to produce a better site for my users.
You state that as a business, you don't need Google. So obviously I can only determine that you must be getting a large majority of your business from other sources rather than from Google.
So it rather negates your statement that anyone looking for your services needs Google to find you, doesn't it?
Designers are like artists. Even business owners can be. People have different ideas for design and for business. They shouldn't be penalized for that. When we did it, we had no clue about PR. Never heard of it. Each domain built it's rep doing what its thing. Now we'd have to lose that credibility each domain has built over years just because some people abuse cross linking? That's not fair and would make all sites on the net use the same design principles. That spells B-O-R-I-N-G to me...
Now we'd have to lose that credibility each domain has built over years just because some people abuse cross linking?
Only if you abuse crosslinking. There's nothing that says you have to (or should) crosslink a large group of separate sites.
I was responding to the post about the post asking: why add a domain for different types of content and something about better design being one domain for all your content.
I already mentioned that I didn't abuse it and couldn't possibly abuse it because it was never built w/ PR in mind. How can I abuse a system I am ignorant of (PR?)? Besides which, I also stated that I asked experts on WW to check it for me and they told me I'm fine... I think you kind of missed my point, but that's OK, I probably didn't do a good enough job explaining it....
Designers are like artists.
Yes, they can be. What a perfect analogy!
Have you ever noticed that word that is often connected to "artist"? The reason there are som many starving artists is that most of their art is garbage to all but a few people.
There is some truley great art that is appreciated during it's own time. But most people think that most of it is just annoying junk.
The same thing applies to the web. If I am looking for information I don't want to look at the fancy stuff or the website that thinks it's important to link every page on one site to the home pages on all their other 50 sites. I don't want to look at your flash. I don't want to load jpgs that contain your text layout.
You and your artsy friends are free to build your sites however you want. You just have no right to expect to get a link from any site that does not like the way you do things. That includes Google.
If you need the traffic google sends your way, you should concern yourself with what google expects in a site. It IS your choice.
As someone in print publishing for over a decade i know that the people who made the money were the publishers, and the artists were paid a pittance. The margin unfortunately is for those who promote, package and price, than actually produce the product.
Thats why we see advertising managers in suits and artists in rags!
such is life.
You can choose your destiny. Retain your artistic credibility or mould it to make it more commercial. Both have their rewards and punishments.
Like a beautiful web page and an optimized one, you cant have it both ways.
I will try again.
If you want google traffic, you should learn what google thinks is unacceptable. It may be unacceptable because it is a practice that leads to bad results more often than not. It does not even have to be spam, it just has to lead to bad results.
If you do not care about google traffic, feel free to do whatever you want. If the google traffic does not matter then who cares.
if you are somewhere in between, consider the cost/benefit ratio. you will probably end up keeping within the guidelines, while not doing everything necessary to get consistant page one results on all your searches.
As I have stated elsewhere, think of the it as an editorial policy in a magazine that has a free ad section. To get in the free ad section you have to operate your business a certain way, and put up with the whim of the editor on that particular day. That magazine also offers you the choice of doing whatever you want and paying for your ad space. It's your choice.
I'm just wondering if they could make the guidelines a bit clearer so we can be sure not to cross the line they drew in the sand.
They came up w/ PR. Crosslinking is good for PR. But once it gets too good for PR, then Google penalizes you. But where is that line? Too unclear I think...
If the point about the thread was what webmasters should do, then the answer is so obvious that we don't have to bother continuing the discussion. If the discussion is about what Google can do (if they choose to, since this is the one place we know they watch), then let's talk about that. And indeed that is the point that made me participate in the thread.
A site owner with a PR9 site is allowed to crosslink with 6 other sites and generates secondary PR8 sites.
A site owner with a PR5 site cross links with 6 other sites and gets a Google penalty!
This is one rule for the rich and another rule for the "poorer".
I have seen the major Internet cornerstones kill my cats for several months. Their pages are not relevant, they are spam, users don't like them, I know because pages ranked #6 are still getting equal sales, the ones above are just being passed over!
What this means for Google.....it means providing irrelevant results will not discourage some users...they will click lower and lower until they find the good stuff.
But, at the same time I have seen major increases in traffic and sales from other SE's. Especially MSN (without using Overture/Looksmart).
What that tells me.....Google is becoming less relevant, users are migrating to other SE's.....long term we have seen Google peek, now we will see it decline.
A site owner with a PR9 site is allowed to crosslink with 6 other sites and generates secondary PR8 sites.
I suspect that crosslinking penalties are applied manually, not algorithmically, which means that human judgment is involved. For example:
About.com has hundreds of subdomains (wrestling.about.com, football.about.com, or whatever), and there's quite a bit of linking between them: e.g., a typical About.com subdomain will have links to five or six "related sites" on every page. This is probably acceptable to Google because (a) the subdomains are distinct "guidesites" on different topics that are run by different people, and (b) similar or duplicated content isn't likely to clutter up or even dominate Google's search results.
An affiliate site that specializes in hotel booking, on the other hand, might have 50 or 100 subdomains that are virtually identical except for their titles and subdomain names (parischeapohotels.com, londoncheapohotels.com, etc.). They're really just one site, and each site has links to the other 49 or 99 subdomains. The site reeks of SEO spam, and if no penalty were applied, its pages might well dominate the SERPS and reduce the quality of the Google search experience for users. So a spam referee at Google probably wouldn't hesitate to whip out his red card and send the site off the field with a PR0.
If crosslinking penalties were applied algorithmically, the trigger point would need to be fairly high to avoid penalizing sites that crosslink legitimately (such as manhattan.widgets.edu and brooklyn.widgets.edu, or usa.bigairline.com and uk.bigairline.com). And even then, Google might want to have the flagged sites undergo a quick human inspection before being penalized unless other "spam factors" made it almost certain that the crosslinking sites were in fact violating Google's guidelines.
I'm almost positive that I saw a previous discussion on crosslinking, where I asked about the same thing and GG or a moderator here said specifically that G does apply the crosslinking penalty algorithmically. In fact, someone said they did it, got a PR penalty, fixed the issue and had ban lifted following month.
This leads me to believe that cross-linking is kind of like guestbooks. They will use it as an indicator of potential spam more than they will automatically ban on it. But if you crosslink your duplicate content, and someone goes and takes a look at it, watch out.
This leads me to believe that cross-linking is kind of like guestbooks. They will use it as an indicator of potential spam more than they will automatically ban on it. But if you crosslink your duplicate content, and someone goes and takes a look at it, watch out.
That makes a lot of sense. Still, GoogleGuy has said that Google prefers to deal with spam via an algorithm when possible (if only for reasons of scaleability), so there may come a time when penalties are applied automatically if a number of questionable practices are detected by Google. The penalties wouldn't even have to be as extreme as PR0 or an outright ban: The algorithm could apply a variable penalty based on the site or page's "spam score." This would have several advantages:
1) It would fit the punishment to the crime, so to speak;
2) It would yield better search results for the user, since shady SEO practices would be detected and dealt with quickly instead of waiting for a human review (or for a spam report);
3) It would discourage spam more effectively than the human-review method does, since people using shady SEO practices could be almost certain of receiving a quick penalty.
It is only when your entire PR is generated completely by sites within your own network that you run into trouble.
