Dear Matt,
Thank you for launching the new Link Disavow Tool. Hopefully it will allow a number of high quality sites and businesses that were hit by penalties like Penguin to recover. My concern however is that it will create more confusion than already exists, as impossible as that may be. I doubt you’ll be keen to remove this tool just after launching it, but either way I’d like to propose a much simpler alternative.
First, The Problem:
Many high quality sites and businesses have been hit by massive penalties since Panda. I’ll refrain from talking about Panda from here on out since it’s not primarily related to links, but it was around that time that you guys (Google) seemed to shift from smaller, more targeted penalties and algo adjustments to massive penalties and devaluations with a great deal of ‘collateral damage’. I realize there have always been changes, but I’ve been working online full time since 2005 and have never seen anything like what’s been going on since February 2011.
I’m sure you know the SEO game a lot better than I do. Since I started out on the web, you needed links in order to rank in competitive niches. In my primary business niche, if you didn’t get links, you didn’t rank. All of us bought links, because we needed to in order to rank. I know this. You know this. Aside from buying links to rank among our real competitors, we also needed them to rank above spammers with low quality affiliate and made-for-Adsense sites. We did have a choice, but as a real business there was only one good one at the time. Buy links and rank, or don’t buy links and be outranked by competitors and spammers. Surely you already know that.
I understand you want to get rid of low quality sites in your search results. I’m all for that. I want to see quality results as much as the next guy. I’m a searcher too. But when you guys started applying negative factors to spammers and low quality sites that bought links, you also wiped out scores of high quality sites that were forced to buy links in order to outrank the spammers for the last several years. It’s not only spammers that buy links. I’m sure you know that, too.
So why are you decimating these high quality sites and businesses? For a while, I thought you were just evil people acting in your own self interest with no concern for others. But I had a conversation with a programer the other day who had another theory: It’s not that you guys are evil, careless people. You’re just so focused on fighting spam that you don’t even see the ‘collateral damage’. You see the low quality, spam sites that get taken out, and you see the big brands that continue to rank no matter what they do, and all looks ok. You don’t see the diversity that your updates are wiping out, the specialty sites that offer a better user experience than the big brands…the sites that previously needed to buy links in order to rank. In fact, regardless how good your intentions are, these small sites likely still have to buy links in order to beat the slew of big brands who are now able to rank blank pages with keywords in their title tags due to their massive authority and head start in the race.
The Link Disavow Tool
Enter the new Link Disavow Tool. Now, quality sites have a way to remove those links they used to need in order to rank…those links that you guys attached a negative ranking factor to, or used to trigger a site wide devaluation like Penguin. So if a business owner is lucky enough to have heard about Google Webmaster Tools and read about this new tool, they might have a chance at ranking their penalized site again.
But Which Links Are Problematic?
I’ve got a blog that I unfortunately haven’t posted on in over a year. It’s a real blog with no ads or affiliate links. A couple of years ago someone contacted me about doing a guest post, a completely legitimate guest post that was on topic and written by a topical expert. A few months ago I received an email from an SEO company requesting I remove the link to help their client recover from a Google penalty. How many people will use your new tool in such a way, to remove legitimate links that are helping them rank? How many sites will look to you like ‘bad’ sites, because people mistakenly request that links on them be disavowed?
I know you offer some guidance on that subject. But you and I both know that many people won’t even know your tool exists, others won’t read your guidance, and plenty people who do read it still won’t know which links to disavow.
A Much Simpler, More Ethical Solution
The current penalties are applied according to a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ approach. That might be ok if we were discussing hobby sites. But I talked to a guy two days ago with an awesome, incredibly useful site that fulfills an important need, especially in today’s economy. He’s about to sell his house, move his family, and begin looking for a new job due to his business being decimated by these penalties. He’s been labeled as guilty for doing what it took to compete. There are thousands of similar cases. I can only hope you guys aren’t thinking about them because you’re so focused on the spammers.
So rather than applying a negative value to links you don’t want to count, how about simply not counting them? At least you wouldn’t be penalizing high quality sites and businesses. If they were ranking solely on the basis of those paid or otherwise low quality links, then they’re going to have some work to do. But that’s unlikely. If they are a high quality site, they’ll have some high quality links too. The spammers will have less. So by simply discounting the spammy or low quality links, you’ll be ensuring that the quality sites rank above the spam sites.
Spammers will keep trying to game your algorithm. They’re going to do that anyway. They’re going to keep sending me loads of junk mail, bombard my blog with stupid comments, and even hack my sites with links cloaked for only Googlebot to see. None of that is going to change. Adding a negative factor to paid and spammy links might cut down on attempted manipulation. But it’s also decimating high quality sites and businesses.
So I understand you’re waging a war on spammers. I’m glad you are, as I don’t want to find spam when I search, and I don’t want to see spam sites outranking high quality, informative, useful sites. But the way you’re doing this now…penalizing sites that only did what they needed to do in order to compete under the system you built, using a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ approach, and then requiring them to use your link removal tool…is both unlikely to work well and unethical.
With all due respect, for the the sake of all humanity, please simply don’t count links you don’t like!
Good luck with that. Despite the great points you’re making, there is no way you’re going to get a response.
As Google, If you wanted your machine learning Penguin algorithm to be layered with human data… who’m better to request it from than SEO’s?
I was trying to keep the post relatively short, not going into all the additional issues, problems, and traps this Link Disavow Tool is likely to lead to.
The problem with getting “SEO’s” to do their work for them, if that was a motivation, is they’re going to end up with all sorts of false positives and requests to remove links that were helping sites.
This tool, whether we use it or not, is going to add another layer of complexity for SEO’s and Google. For the average webmaster, it will make it harder to do business, leading to even less diversity and more big brand dominance. It would be so much easier and better for us all to simply discount links they don’t want to count.
I completely agree! I’ve dealt with so many webmasters who just feel they should remove almost every link they have, some of them don’t get it and over-react even if google’s intentions were otherwise. Google should ideally just ignore the links it doesn’t like, I don’t understand why it would want scores of webmasters spending time dealing with link removals – google wants to index those pages, negatively count all those links but it will simply not ignore them – how much sense does that make?
I don’t write much, anyway here is what I think:
semmetric.org/why-google-doesnt-devalue-spam/
No doubt Google is unable to find and discount all “bad” links, and the recent updates are a heavy dose of FUD. However, my point is that there is a better solution than the approach they’re taking. Even if they can’t discount all bad links, things will just go on as they have been. People with legit businesses will have to continue to buy links, but they’ll tend to beat the total spammers due to getting more high quality links. Google does seem to have gotten better at counting those. I realize they can be gamed too. But an “innocent until proven guilty” approach would be better for society…and that’s what I’m arguing for.
Great post. I have been thinking about this for some time.
Google is turning into something that lists things that we already know about – brands. But as we now about these results already anyway, becasue of the advertising campaigns run offline, we can just use Firefox and type in what we look for in the adress bar – and save one step.
Google is turning into a predicting machine instead of a search engine.
FINALLY… someone who said what I’ve been thinking. Just don’t count bad links. We give Google all of this credit for being so sophisticated. Yet they still can deliver an algorithm that can’t be manipulated by links.
To me Google has gone down a dangerous road. For the first time, links can actually hurt a website. This opens up Pandora’s box to me.
And to top it all off… Google wants us to be guinea pigs and help them clean up their bloated index.
They should have never launched Caffeine. In their rush to index the web in real time, they lost control over the quality of their index. That’s their fault.
Thanks DeeSEO! Not a bad point at all about Caffeine. It did seem to cause them to index way more low quality junk.
Max, this is an excellent letter to Matt Cutts
I agree with your post 100% and I’d like to say that it’s too bad that Google doesn’t have competition. If Yahoo and Bing would be up there head to head with Google, Google might think twice about playing around with people’s lifeline.