Google is hitting the blog networks really hard and has their sights set on them. Today it is official that one that tried to emulate Build My Rank has now been almost decimated by the de-indexing of Google.
Rank Jumpers sent out the following to their subscribers today:
Rank Jumpers is very disheartened to say that the recent
change by Google to go after blog networks has now affected Rank Jumpers. We have had a large deindexing of blogs.
After careful consideration we have decided to cease the
blog network services by Rank Jumpers. In short we are
shutting down the blog network. Google is very aggressive
with their attempts to go after the networks and it would
be worthless to try to replace blogs etc.Our Process:
We will offer a full credit back to any customers that purchased our services in April. We will pro-rate the credit back for customers that purchased the monthly service in March. We will also credit back any credits that have not been used!The deindexed sites will have all posts removed as soon as
possilble. All other posts will be removed shortly after!
It’s interesting that after the fall of Build My Rank, Rank Jumpers was touted by many others including themselves as a viable alternative. Problem is, they had such a similar footprint that I predicted it would not be long before Google was able to track them down and de-index them. It wasn’t that difficult to figure out, even for me (and I’m not a Google algorithm) what sites were probably in the Rank Jumper network.
And again, of course, many website owners are lamenting the fact that there search engine rankings have dropped considerably and they are getting the dreaded “unnatural link building” warning message from Google.
If you solely relied on this type of back linking, it does mean trouble for you.
But, all these “unnatural link building” warning messages from Google certainly does increase the specter of negative seo as I wrote about the other day.
I am actually seeing this happen to one of my own sites, and it is not because of any unnatural link building that I’ve done. A couple of months ago, Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) reported about 14,000 backlinks to the site – which was pretty normal – no unnatural link building was every done to the site as that is not how I work.
A couple of weeks ago, I was shocked to see that GWT was reporting over a million backlinks! Upon further investigation, I discovered that Google had somehow found the IP address as well as the server name that the website exists on – and in doing so, had found two different “aliases” for the website that in reality, it should not have. So it is actually “seeing” this as several different sites, all with links back to the main website, and in this manner, has counted up hundreds of thousands of back links that really are not “real” backlinks at all. This is a huge problem with the Google Bot’s way of scouring the internet – and is obviously a weakness of Google.
There is a plan in place to correct this as obviously, going from 13,000 back links to over a million in a short span of a month or so would appear unnatural under most circumstances (but not all).
But subsequently, I noticed some major search terms that the site used to rank for, drop out of the sky. I have yet to see a “unnatural link building” warning, but it is puzzling to me how Google could claim they have precautions in their algorithm to ensure they are not counting the wrong thing as “unnatural link building” when it would appear that they may not.
I am fairly convinced the drop in rankings is related to the enormous number of so called “back links” (which are not really back links at all) that Google claims to have found.
And that leads me to believe that negative SEO is truly something that is going to be experimented with in a major way by those who are so unethical to do so. I’m not sure what Google is going to do about this, because it is obvious to me that in punishing some quality sites, they are promoting others that are obviously garbage – and even some that really have nothing to do with a particular search term at all.
Time to let the dust settle after these changes.