Today, I wanted to take a bit of time looking for snippets of information from Google’s representatives and post my thoughts on them. We’ll concentrate on things that may raise flags over at the big G.
From Matt Cutt’s Blog
“We saw so many urls suddenly showing up on spaces.live.com that it triggered a flag in our system which requires more trust in individual urls in order for them to rank (this is despite the crawl guys trying to increase our hostload thresholds and taking similar measures to make the migration go smoothly for Spaces). We cleared that flag, and things look much better now.“
So many URLs showing up will raise a flag in Google’s system and it seems that a filter of some kind will be implemented unless individual URLs has enough trust. A few things of interest here, but something that caught my attention was TRUST in terms of individual URLs and not the domain.
From Google’s Webmaster Blog
What isn’t duplicate content?
Though we do offer a handy translation utility, our algorithms won’t view the same article written in English and Spanish as duplicate content. Similarly, you shouldn’t worry about occasional snippets (quotes and otherwise) being flagged as duplicate content.
Pretty clear cut this bit, so all you worry about yourlanguage pages can relax a bit. It also mentions in the post that Google prefers to filterpages rather than ranking adjustments so in most cases, one version of your duplicate contents will be filtered out.
From Adam Lasniks’ post on Webmasters’ World
Anyway, I hope this has put some fears to rest. I link to friends who link to me; we like each others’ sites, we think that folks who visit our sites might like them, too. And that’s fine! And also, as Sugarrae pointed out, it’s only natural that someone may want to link to an article that links to them. Reciprocal linking happens, and it’s very often done in a natural, innocent way.
Over time and with lots and lots of data (and very handy tools for crunching it :-), it becomes more clear to us at Google what is “natural” (or organic) on the Web and what is not. We aim to reward the former, discount the latter. Take that as a broader SEO strategy statement if you will… it’s not just about links, and it’s DEFINITELY not all about reciprocal linking.
Basically repeating what the Google guys have been saying all along. Google doesnt ban your site for one slight indication that you have been naughty but rather the little boy that consistantly shows a pattern of being naughty. It may filter or even penalise you for something if it fits their pattern of bad behaviour.
It is only natural for Google to base their algos on patterns rather than one-offs with regards to the number of URLs it needs to process raising the dreaded Google flags and filters if it hits a certain pattern threshold. For example, if you have a spelling mistake on one of your pages, its not going to make your SERPs suffer as Google would not know if its unintentional. However, if your domain is filled with spelling mistakes, a few links from bad neighbourhoods, broken coding, duplicate content … there maybe a chance that it’ll trip some kind of filter.
All in all, play nice and you’re be ok and more importantly, build for your users.
Don't forget to subscribe to the Xenyo Blog feed!
3 comments ↓
Building for users is hard, I like to build and then find users, lol. Anyway, its a suggestion worth trying.
Nice post, I believe that if your site have 25% reciprocal links, then it should be fine with google.
I will dig out another statement from the Google guys regarding links history, maybe for the next post. It suggests something along the lines of there are sites do perfectly well with alot of reciprocals.
Actually, we know this to be true as a link baiting plan was very successful with one of our client’s site and they had over 70% reciprocals of some kind. They rank and have ranked in the first page of 2 very competitive keywords for over a year. Maybe its a consistency thing as the Google guy suggested in that post that I need to find.
Leave a Comment