Comments on: Google’s New Ghostwriter Penalty

By: jonaths

jonaths — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:43:28 +0000

I was never quite sure it was a penalty - posted my thoughts on the whole debacle over here.

By: Brawnydt

Brawnydt — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:56:17 +0000

Heh, thanks King. That’s very true. By the way, as a side note, I can’t find you in the top ten G search results for “King” either. Dang Google for keeping the little guy down! (joking of course)

By: King

King — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:28:12 +0000

Benefit of the doubt and all that, how about ‘search engine marketing system’?

No, I’m sorry I still can’t find you (but I am always happy to be corrected)

So I guess the point I’m trying to make is that sometimes we need to ask ourselves the questions we rush to ask of others. In this case – what are you doing wrong? or not doing?

Take it easy, King.

By: King

King — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:23:42 +0000

@ TheSystem

“Google has never made it easier to rank for ANY keyword!”

That’s a really interesting comment considering I can’t actually see you ranking for ‘thesystem’ or indeed ‘the-system’!

By: The System

The System — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:35:06 +0000

Brawnydt “True they were doing it a little more openly, but G is making it so hard to rank for anything unless you are Amazon or Ebay these days that there’s nothing of value to find on their search engine most of the time.”

Wow, what are you doing wrong? or not doing?
Google has never made it easier to rank for ANY keyword!

By: The System

The System — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:42:45 +0000

They played the hard way, they got found out, and grassed up hundreds of times, many sites before though not as high profile, have suffered the same fate or worse. Their penalty will be short lived due to their adwords spend – their ‘bounce back rate’ will only be as good as the NEW SEO team they employ!

By: King

King — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 14:51:16 +0000

Hey guys
I am not querying the reasoning behind a potential penalty more how you have labelled it a ‘ghostwriter penalty’.

There’s a whole debate going on over at insiders-view.co.uk if you are interested, likewise check out here.org.uk if you want more info on the approach straight from the horses mouth ie. from the guys who run ContentNow.

It is certainly proving to be an interesting debate, however the TOS is not transparent enough with regards to non-paid for links IMO. That’s where it boils down to individual interpretation of the ‘rules’.

By: admin

admin — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 14:24:23 +0000

Howdy King – Google have yet to confirm the cause behind the GoCompare penalty and I don’t mean to make it sound like I’ve got insider info on this (because I haven’t – and I don’t want to suggest that I do), but it certainly appears as if GoCompare were penalised because they were a) emailing webmasters in bulk b) offering to provide an article with a link back to them that the webmaster would then claim as their own and c) automating the process to the extent that the webmaster would have to tell the content team what content they wanted written. If they were penalised for a different reason, I’d be very very surprised. Hopefully we’ll hear from Google soon and get some kind of clarity.

I’ve not totally made up my mind about this strategy yet, because content for links isn’t necessarily a bad thing and can often be a healthy part of blogging, and sharing information as a whole – but GoCompare is effectively saying “tell us what content you want written, we’ll write it and you give us a link back”. And they’re doing that on a large scale. Now look at that scenario from a web spam point of view – are those links back to GoCompare editorial votes of quality? Would you consider it a link scheme?

It’d be interesting to hear your opinions on this – it’s certainly a creative strategy and it’s interesting to see how far a (potentially fairly clean) tactic can be pushed.