Google’s 2012 Phishing Expedition: When Matt Cutts Goes Fishing You’re the Fish

As SEOs and Inbound Marketers it’s important that we keep our finger on the pulse of what changes Google is making with Search, but oftentimes doing so whips our community into a “the sky is falling” frenzy that often results in a flurry of “SEO is dead” posts. It seems that over the first quarter of 2012 the Ministry of Truth that is Google’s Webspam Team has been on a fishing expedition and SEO’s and marketing managers are the fish.

If you have recently received a warning from Google Webmaster Tools about suspicious inbound links to your site you are not alone… Google’s Tiffany Oberoi shared with the SMX West crowd in late February that Google has sent out over 700,000 messages via Webmaster tools in the first two months of 2012.  This number is unprecedented:  the first sixty days of the year has seen roughly as many messages as were broadcast in 2010 & 2011 combined.  Juxtapose this with the recent announcements from the Inside Search blog about the change in link evaluation and then by Matt Cutts during SXSW around Google’s intentions to discourage not reward over-optimization, and you can see where things are heading.
Google is well aware of the power they have over the SEO community and it’s their ambiguity that leads unseasoned marketers to scramble to make changes to their sites. Rule of Thumb: Until you have data that backs up Google’s claims, it’s better to not make a move.
There’s a lot of discussion buzzing around the community regarding this topic, so we’ve taken the last few days and discussed experiences and perspectives with several of our partners and colleagues across the industry to try and provide some clarity and context.  Our job as SEOs is not just to reverse engineer algorithms, but human intention as well.

Sorry to drag up what may amount as bad memories (for at least some of you) but that statistics class you took years and years ago:  remember type I and type II errors? Type I describes a false positive, and type II describes a false negative.  The easy example for this is to think of a base concept of our justice system: given a choice it is far more preferable to allow a dozen guilty persons to go free (Type II error) rather than accidentally hang one innocent person (Type I error).  This is the tacit cost of a free and just society.
This same logic has and always will be applied by search engines when it comes to suspicious links pointing to a website.  Since any site can link to anything, it’s difficult and risky for search engines to identify suspect third party website links and penalize the recipient.  If that were not the case, the SEO industry would (unfortunately) be filled with Google Bowling services building suspicious links to your competitors’ sites.

The search engines recognized this conundrum and long ago resigned to the reality of living with type II errors.  String every outwardly guilty looking site up by the neck with a penalty and pretty soon everyone will be hanging around with their feet off the ground… The only real thing the SE’s could do is discount links that appeared contrived.  And that’s been continual process over years and years.  Florida Update and the Hilltop filter long ago wiped out thematically irrelevant sites and A↔B linking schemes.  We’ve seen the rise and fall of effectiveness of services that offer automated link networks that utilize ad servers, link boxes (standalone anchor text links resting on the sidebars and footers often stacked up on top of one another), and the like.  Despite popular rhetoric, these kind of sloppy automated link building approaches don’t tend to cause penalties; they are just simply discounted by the algos and rendered moot.  We’re simply witnessing another aggressive step in this evolutionary process.

Reverse Engineering Human Intention

Naturally, Google has the ears and eyes of the search marketing world, and if you’re in Matt’s role and you must improve search quality, what do you do? Asking people to turn each other in didn’t work so well, so what is the next logical tried and true approach by leaders throughout history? Scare tactics! Google delivers in extremely vague messages along the lines of I know what you did Last Summer, but point out no specifics and as a result panic ensues!
You’re sure to get a percentage of folks to have a come-to-Jesus moment, report themselves, and request reconsideration.  They’re likely to not only acknowledge the things that were suspicious, but they may well additionally remove things that were not considered suspicious. You’ve almost got to admire this crafty textbook example of manipulating human psychology. Ladies and gentlemen we are in the middle of the Google Phishing Expedition of 2012 and you are the fish.
Of course a larger subset of recipients will not admit anything around removing existing links nor apply for reconsideration.  They may however have the fear of God Google scared into them and discontinue any future initiatives. Large volumes of vague and looming threats are going drive behavior change: it’s a smart play if you are working at a SE and your mission is to discourage artificial activities.
What’s the aftermath behind these emails?  In a small minority of cases rankings are eventually being affected.  There certainly a lot of articles posted to help companies seeking remedy from the cut corner tactics that have landed them in the Google pickle jar.  After conferring with several agencies and knowledgeable practitioners it’s apparent that a small percentage of sites that have been warned are subsequently seeing instances of certain head term rankings taking a hit a few weeks after receipt of these emails.  It’s important to note however that in most instances folks are reporting no noticeable consequence…

However, it is important to note that Google announced nearly 50 updates to Search at the end of March and many sites across many verticals experienced “flash crashes” in number of pages indexed and rankings during the middle and end of the month. I call these flash crashes because large portions of sites dropped off the face of the SERPs for as many as 4 days and rebounded completely. You can see this for yourself across many sites in the STAT Codex. As these are not clients of ours there is no telling whether these sites received Webmaster Tools messages or not. But, if a site has these flash crashes and has read news of the devaluation of link networks like BuildMyRank,  Google’s scare tactic might cause some sites to jump the gun and admit to artificial linking done in the present, past, or even distant past.
These emails aren’t forewarnings of an impending penalty.  Things are not plummeting fifty spots down, nor disappearing off the face of the Google universe. These hundreds of thousands of warnings are simply saying that there may be as little as one backlink pointing to a site that appears suspect. We even heard of one instance where a site that did some not so intelligent link building back in 2007, and has been stagnant for five years (no new activity at all), suddenly got a warning email last month. There’s no statute of limitations to be found here.
Whether there’s a slipping in ranking following the receipt of one of these letters has everything to do with the makeup of a domain’s backlink portfolio.  Whatever Google is deeming as ‘suspicious’ is now getting filtered out much more aggressively than in the past. If 1% of your backlinks is deemed suspicious and suddenly gets filtered, there’s not likely to be any effect.  If ~70% of your backlinks are suddenly whacked by this newer more aggressive filter, then yes, rankings will certainly slip significantly.
The kind of backlinks most exposed to this recent update are the over optimized insert-your-main-keyword–in-the-anchor-text-every-single-time kind. Until recently, these keywords were being considered by the SE’s, and for competitive head keywords they were often an important pillar for these sites to rank for hugely competitive queries. Now we are hearing weekly about one spammy, automated network after another being obliterated.  Many find it surprising it’s actually taken this long…
From our vantage point we see some basic commonalities existing from an off-page perspective when sites experience a significant ranking loss subsequent to a warning letter.  The sites commonly feature:

• Volumes of over optimized anchor text (generally to the most competitive head terms)
• Links coming from multiple outside websites which show clear signs of being networked (same IP or C-Block class, cross linking, same Google AdSense ID,same/similar coding or CMS technology – double check the links your vendor gets you using SpyOnWeb.)
• Poor overall deep linking ratio to the site
• Low quality sites (repurposed content) and off topic sites

So You’ve Been Baited by a Webmaster Tools Email: What Do You Do?

There are a lot of options on how to play this out, and a wide range of opinions on what to do.  There’s no perfect answer, but here are some thoughts:

1. You have the right to remain silent. Probably best to exercise this Miranda right.
   1. If the links in question are a small portion of your overall backlink portfolio, you will probably not face a serious threat to rankings or traffic. Ignore the email.
   2. If you have engaged in heavy over-optimization of anchor text links, and/or link building from heavily networked sites, you are not really penalized from these links; they’ve just stopped taking effect.  If it’s not a penalty, then turning yourself in for something artificial within your backlink portfolio is likely not going to help you.
One of the most important points to be clear on is the difference between a penalty, and filter.  Make sure that everyone on your team understands this critical difference.





2. If you have seen a large portion of your links suddenly become discounted and rankings are tanking, there’s no immediate fix.  Build the right expectations within your company to understand what has happened and what the timeline will be to remedy the situation. SEO Directors are witnessing things called out today from sloppy link building programs conducted by predecessors years ago.  Make it clear that these warnings may stem from activity from yesteryear, and sell folks on your plan to lead the domain (and the business!) to salvation.




3. (Re)Build your domain’s authority and trust the right way. Some sidesteps may have been taken to achieve an artificial level of authority for your most competitive keywords.  These shortcuts may have worked for some time, but now they do not.  A material percentage of (what was) your meaningful backlink portfolio has been lost.  Make up for that loss through proper link building initiatives that drive the process naturally.
   




4. The old school rules are the right rules. Nothing has changed. Go back to the old fashioned values, they work!  Develop citations and links from trusted sites that are independent of other sites you work with.  Your backlinks should be as independent and distributed as the SERPs themselves are.  Focus on domain authority and trust, not on anchor text optimization and keyword jockeying.  Stay away from automated approaches, networks, blog posts from school children in the Philippines…
   




5. Link Reclamation services are often essential. Reach out to the domains linking to you:  see if you can de-emphasize your anchor text or find some other way to work with the site owner.  Use this as an opportunity to promote new products or enhancements to your services.  Drive a higher natural deep link ratio: get more sites to link to a more diverse number of deep pages. Don’t discount the value of an experienced consultant or agency to do this right way and maximize the reclamation opportunity (yes, there goes our shameless plug).  You only want to reach out to websites that link to you once:  have the right conversation the first time- one shot!
   

The Last Word

Finally, understand that Google’s transparency is made to serve its own objectives. Stay aware of the announcements from the Google Search Quality team, but don’t treat them as gospel until you can verify what they’ve said with your own experiences and data.  Ultimately, we are all swimming in Google’s pond but it’s up to us decide whether we are going to swim with the school of fish caught in the net or if we’re going to be the whales that offset the tide.