Google Bowling
[Update: I've managed to get a FREE copy of Dr Andy's excellent guide to creating affiliate websites that Google loves. Just click here to download it. No squeeze page, just open the zip file and enjoy the 155-page PDF!]
I’ve been building new affiliate websites to diversify away from the Internet Marketing niche for the last few years.
In the past, getting Google to index and rank a new site wasn’t difficult. In fact, my last two IM products were to do with using datafeed content (going back several years!) and, more recently, using the power of a “future niche” to plant your website at the top of Google and stay there.
But, I’ve noticed that Google is using its penalty filters more strictly now than it used to. It seems that if you build a few “suspicious” links, with optimised anchor text, you’ll get slapped with a penalty filter before you can blink.
What interesting is that this activity breaks one of the fundamental rules of Google… a website owner is NOT responsible for links pointing to their website. The reason for this Golden Rule is simple… if it didn’t exist, the world of Black Hat SEO would spend their time and energy building BAD links to competitors to push them out of the search engine results pages (known as Google Bowling).
OK, so how can Google justify breaking its own Golden Rule? Well, it seems that the penalty is only applied to brand new sites… those whose age is measured in months rather than years. And here’s the super-smart bit… Google’s algorithm mostly prevents new sites ranking for competitive phrases… so there won’t be much “Google Bowling” going on because, by definition, trying to knock a competitor out of the rankings only makes sense if they have a valuable number one ranking.
It’s genius. You let webmasters build new websites and if they do anything suspicious in the first year (my guess for how long probation lasts), they’re on the “naughty step”. You give a free pass to any website older than a year to prevent Google bowling. You apply penalties algorithmically to avoid any manual overheads.
My guess is that you can avoid the 12-month probation by getting a link or two from older sites who have some authority and can “vouch” for your new website. If you can’t get those links, be prepared for a long wait before you can do any “real” link building.
What do you think? Am I right, or wrong? I’ll leave comments open for a few days. Also, please share this blog post if you like it… thanks! 
[Thanks for all your feedback. Comments are now closed]
Neil,
If I understood Steve Wyman correctly, the only reason for this blog is for you to collect backlinks. Yes? No? The Internet can’t rely on those Google boys to be the cyber police. They can’t protect us from rubbish when part of the rubbish is actually being generated by the people who advise us against creating it.
Hi
Not quite. I believe Neil is doing the seo community a service and he should be rewarded for that. The discussion is an excellent one and I just had some points I was trying to make let me try to be clearer
1) Folks should not obsess over each link. Just build them. No follows have a “value” as they are a natural link.
2) A lot of Blogs do set their links to No follow I think thats short sighted. It doesnot reward us the commenators and its also not how the web was designed to work. Sure we still get a link back to our site which some people follow anyway (opps my site is gone !! how did that happen must fix it asap)
3) there are certianly over 250 factors that google use to rank a page or site so the age of the site could be one of them. In fact im experimenting with extending the registration period of some site to see the effect some i will then build links to very quickly and see if a fomain registered for 5 years but with fast link building still gets sandboxed.
4) personelly i have domains that are 3 years old and I build links to 2 of them very quickly and BANG they got deranked or sandboxed at the next crawl ! they had top ten places for over 2 years but still then got hit.
Just adding fuel to the cause.
regards
Interesting article. My experience has been that most of my sites actually increased in traffic, even the younger ones, and only a couple went down.. and that was all from the one algorithm change. It did surprised me though when the one that was a PR2 just dropped out of sight. It had the best backlinks and the best content AND the most articles. How and why that happened I have no idea. Oh… and the domain was over 2 years old.
Cheers
John
I think that is the main problem here, that Google keeps everything in his hands. And this Main problem. Not just in Rating, but in each area !!
I can approve too, that my new site just going up on Rating. For now, I don’t have any problem. But, I think, that was John, who wrote, that we must put on our sites Value and Unique Content and in Back links (Comments), too. So, if we wanna Succeed in this, we must do from day to day, with Clear and our Content, without any Duplicate !
Cheers
Alex
A year been the probation period? I don’t know…. will this just increase the demand for aged domains and then its just business as usual in markets for online products?
Hi Neil,
You are definitely on solid ground. I also work for an SEO company and we’ve been seeing this with brand new sites for the last 12-14 months.
My boss has been doing SEO non-stop since 1998 and has collected some interesting data on each and every Google update. One thing that’s very clear is that Google has repeatedly come up with ways to lower the rankings of all ecommerce websites, whether or not they are engaged in SEO.
We believe that over the years Google has evolved into a finely crafted fraud. Nothing illegal, just misleading. Google does not want most commercial websites to rank well. Google wants you to buy traffic! That’s how they make those “billions” every quarter. They lose money when too many sites rank well.
Google wants your PPC dollars and that’s all they want. Their verbiage (BS) about “best results for our users” is now just a marketing ploy to attract traffic and then sell that traffic to website owners.
Best regards, Mandy
PS: I became a loyal fan when you released SpamBlitzer. Glad you’re still around,
.