As a kid I saw boxes of Good n’ Plenty at the candy store all the time, and I even liked having some from time to time
But I didn’t think I’d be stuck with it all the time.
Well, now we’ve got Google’s Penalty - and made sure there is no escaping it, according to Matt Cutts, who left a comment on my Webmetricsguru.com blog.
Matt suggested I look at the entire thread of this post in SeoScoop - Matt Cutts, Why Am I Still Being Punished?, which I did, as a place to start in figuring out what happened to the Google Penalty (or Good n’ Plenty) for Know More Media’s properties, including Webmetricsguru.com.
I promised to write about this earlier today (or was it yesterday). Here’s the thing (or “the Scoop”, so to speak):
“…ensure that….paid posts don’t flow PageRank?”
Pretty much, everyone really has to be careful with this, using “no-follow” on the links that come off of any kind of sponsored post or paid link.
Google seems to be able to find needles in a haystack where most of the content owners can’t so easily do that. Matt Cutts says:
“….I wanted to make sure that people knew that submitting a reconsideration request while your site still has paid posts that pass PageRank can be a reason why the reconsideration request doesn’t get approved.”
It seems to me that if Google is now playing “hardball” with site owners - aside from all the other things I’ve said about transparancy, they also need to provide us with similar tools to detect needles in a haystack that Google uses to find violations and penalize us in the first place.
Take Know More Media’s case - you have 100+ blogs and 2+ years of content - that’s easy, 30,000 to 50,000 blog posts and Google, with just one or two paid links that pass PageRank, is going to throw the entire blog network out of it’s index over that?
Yep, it appears that’s it - that’s the reason. But is it fair? No.
It’s not fair - though I’m glad Matt Cutts is, at least, speaking up.
Have to go to bed - way to late to be staying up and blogging about this.
