Fresh Egg has published a blog post today calling out a company which appears to be in direct competition with one of their clients.
The blog post accuses the company of “spamming” and the industry of using “abysmal black hat techniques”.
If you go to Google right now and type in “Hot Tubsâ€, you will get a list of Top 10 results which in fact do not deserve to be there. Straight away I come across meta title spamming! When was it ever ok to write a title like this Hot Tub | Hot Tubs | Spa Hot Tubs UK.
I’ve called out entire industries for being full of paid link spam in the past and I believe that’s fine – as long as you don’t call out a specific company. However as soon as you start calling a specific company a spammer that’s when you can get into legal hot water.
I’m not saying that Fresh Egg are right or wrong about the paid links or the title tag issues but I certainly wouldn’t like to have to stand up in court and justify to a layman why a particular company was guilty of spamming.
Within the industry we know what techniques are white, grey and black but trying to prove it to a court when the Google Guidelines are so vague would be quite a difficult task.
What do you think?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Paid Links aside. Not being funny – when one of their case studies uses a similar title tag convention on their site – isn’t that a case of pot calling the kettle black
lol Peter, that’s very true! And it’s not only one of the case studies…
I think they just got a little stuck for results in a competitive market, and needed to get Google’s attention… But that’s not the best way to do so.
It was happening..it is still happening and it will continue to happen unless the Search Quality Team at Google does something! I have been seeing numerous threads in Google Webmaster Center Groups and this is not something new… its funny why Fresh Egg has published blog post dedicated on Title Tags & Paid Link Spam.. when the Google Team seem to be so quiet over the issues even when the concerns are raised in their moderator Groups!
I really wonder what the Search Quality at Google are really doing? Shouldn’t they be looking into the issues.. and come up with some solutions? Its not just for hot tubs… many other keywords suffer similar worst results & the lists continue…
I’ve just read the post and couldn’t find reference to any specific company – only the techniques that appear to be employed and one example. Perhaps the author should have listed all of the examples from the first three Google SERPs.
If this somehow gains the attention of QC at Google it must surely be a good thing?
What are you supposed to do if the top 10 results are all using blackhat methods, its ok moaning about it to Google but lets me honest, this has been happening for years, I think its strange that he has only just realised.
I have not just only realised, but its getting to a point where it MUST be dealt with and hopefully Google will pay attention.
That is the reason why I posted this, I want to bring this to Google’s attention. This has nothing to do with calling people or companies spammers, that majority of the top 30 is riddled with this, I am not calling anyone in specific a spammer (That link just happened to be one I decided to point out). I am just bringing to light specific floors in the Google algo, so as an SEO and to be honest as a user, I want to see the most relevant results with sites, which are worthy to be where they are and not just with people throwing money to get results. If they want to do that then they should use PPC that’s why its there.
Regards
Just read the post and personally, I couldnt agree more with the author. I have noticed simular patterns with numerous other search terms that I have been targetting. This is pretty poor on Google’s behalf, were they not suppose to be the best search engine around??
Taking all issues above aside, do they consider that sponsored blog posts are also examples of paid links? http://blog.freshegg.com/looking-to-cut-costs_368/
Those links don’t look to be nofollwed to me.
Actually, Musa most certainly didn’t call out the companies involved for the somewhat shadey, and certainly very spammy-looking SERPs. If that’s what works then those companies are quite right to do it. At least for the short-term.
No. Musa is calling out Google on the quality of those SERPs. Quite rightly so. We all know how hard it can be to try to educate a client about the long-term benefit and wisdom of using clean, white-hat tactics when all he can see is that all the top-ranked sites are doing this sort of stuff.
Aren’t we all a little tired of all the Google rhetoric about how they don’t count paid links when we all see SERPs, across any number of verticals, where paid links are the foundation of the entire top 50 or so sites?
Does anyone (other than the companies exploiting the weakness and loopholes in Google right now) think that SERP actually looks good and represents the best quality of search results that Google should be offering?
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Ammon, I agree about Google. I’m tired of seeing rankings built on blatantly paid links too.
My point in this case was – where should SEO blogs/companies draw the line when talking about the tactics used by other companies? At what point could a company sue somebody for an allegation regarding the colour of their SEO tactics?
More comments from Patrick AltoftIt’s agree with Peter and it’s interesting to see that one person was upset with “hot tubs”? The post shows a litle fustration but on the other hand I can understand how Musa is upset.
But still I don’t see any problem with using a title tag with “Hot Tub | Hot Tubs | Spa Hot Tubs UK ” although it’s obviously a SEO title for ranking.
Discussions seems to be interesting ~ finding fault with people engaged on paid links & sponsered posts.
Would someone explain me this – http://forums.digitalpoint.com/search.php?searchid=14346838 ? I suppose this is Matt Sawyer who just commented two posts above..? Matt?
Not to point who’s wrong and who’s right.. just surprised to see this!!
“Sponsored blog posts are also examples of paid links? http://www.thewwwblog.com/web-development-with-datadial-a-must-choose.html – Those links don’t look to be nofollwed to me.”
Hmmm – http://www.thewwwblog.com/wp-content/plugins/oiopub-direct/purchase.php?do=post !!
Wooo!
I think calling them out was ok, however you can’t be mad about someones title tag. Its their choice to put what they want in it and if it is working, congrats to them.
What’s the big deal with paid links anyways? As long as the site is relevant to the user, who cares if they used paid links or social networking link bait BS to get to the top. A company spends $20K monthly on paid links or hires a SEO company for $20K month; is this just more of an issue of where their ad dollars are going? We should only be calling out websites that provide bad user experiences based on the keyword search.
Well, obviously Google will care. The only reason that Google built an algorithm that so heavily depended on links was because they saw them as a measure of genuine citations. Right from the beginning they built in the ability for the spider to recognize the most common ad network links, such as DoubleClick and TradeDoubler and ignore them.
However, once everyone knew that Google was so heavily link-based, of course, the market for crawlable links came into being, and started to affect the rankings a lot. So, Google invented the NOFOLLOW relationship attribute to be used in links. And to make people use it, let it be known that they’d entirely take away the ability of sites that they found to have sponsored, paid links from being able to pass any link-juice at all – even via their internal navigation perhaps.
I’ve seen countless sites suddenly lose all link power, and plenty of sites riding high on the power of paid backlinks suddenly vanish as the entire network came down. Both show that Google are serious. I just don’t think it scales so well, as current SERPs show. By the time Google’s new spider algorithms pattern-recognize one paid link network and totally discount its links forever, four more networks have sprung up to attempt to get into the lucrative link-selling market.
Patrick, it’s an interesting question. My two-pennorth…
If the SEO (company or individual) being accused was actually using Black Hat tactics they probably wouldn’t sue, as it would just draw more attention to them (and public scrutiny of their methods). So I think the question would only arise if the accusation was blatantly false. But no SEO with any knowledge/credibility is going to publicly accuse another SEO, unless they know they can prove it. And those without credibility wouldn’t be worth suing.
I’m not explaining myself very well (need more coffee!), but I think I’m saying that IMHO it is unlikely to happen
Cheers, Jon
Don’t spam for ever! I also do some seo works for my clients,but first I think should make the site friendly to SE,and then often update the content,and preparing some usfull content in the site,make exchange link and so on.in one word,just do it,but don’t spam!
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