Google's Loss of Trust in Backlinks & The SEO PR Timebomb

JC Penny & Forbes both recently got busted by Google in the glare of the world's press. While Forbes went public thanks to some internal bungling in a very public forum, JC Penny got stung deliberately by the NYT. Both events put the world's spotlight firmly on SEO and both arose from increased speculation about the quality of Google's search results in the mainstream press.

We can expect to see more SEO stories hitting the headlines in 2011, which has major implications for agencies, but what's more surprising is the mounting evidence that Google's shaking up the core of its algorithm: backlink evaluation.

In all the furore surrounding JC Penny, the most interesting comment came from Matt Cutts who, when interviewed by the New York Times, referred to an algorithm tweak which had already started to pull back JC Penny's SERP performance before the manual penalty was introduced.

In the NYT article, Matt states that the tweak affected "How we trust links", while refusing to go into detail (as is normal for Matt).

Given the importance of links to the core of Google's algorithm, it's hard to think of such a change as just a 'tweak'. We know from the article that the tweak became visible in JC Penny's results around the 8th of February. We also know that Google confirmed a more major change targeted at reducing the influence of 'Content Farms' on the 28th of January.

Algo changes which impact content farms in a targeted way are unlikely to have any baring on the evaluation of backlinks within Google's algorithm, especially the sort of backlinks JC Penny were caught with. However, Matt also states that the change pushed live on the 28th was just a small part of a larger suite of changes.

From previous interviews with both Mattand Udi Manber, Google's head of search, we know that Google make between 350 and 500 changes a year, but that the changes are bundled up into larger releases - like the 'Mayday' update - after an initial testing period.

Clearly, included in the update confirmed on the 28th of January, was a change - or more precisely a suite of changes - intended to alter the way Google evaluated link quality in cases very similar to those exhibited by JC Penny's unethical backlinking strategy (or, more accurately, SearchDex's strategy: their SEO Agency at the time).

Their strategy basically revolved around placing contextually irrelevant links on domains which otherwise were untainted by SPAM characteristics.

It's a well trodden paid linking strategy, which is one step removed from the original paid link racket: instead of simply buying links from brokers representing hundreds of websites willing to sell links - which would immediately draw Google's attention to link buyer's domain as it become part of a 'Bad Neighbourhood' and likely as not get a straight penalty - the strategy requires a broker (or unethical agency) to hoover up expiring domains on the cheap and maintain their content with new links stealthily (or not) added in or to develop exclusive linking deals from bloggers so no neighbourhood characteristics are triggered.

Also very close to this strategy is offering per-post incentives to bloggers & forum owners, or content spinning where 'unique' content is created by spinning out close to nonsense text onto websites to allow keyphrase-rich links to be hosted back to the target site (and this is where we return again to 'Content Farm' territory: Google's detection of this activity would presumably have been improved with their algorithm adjustments to remove such sites from their search result pages).

What's important to note is that all of these activities are doomed to fail. As well as being unethical, and therefore square in Google's sights in the escalating PR war against spamming their results, they are short-termist, lead to a dependency on the (unethical) agency in charge of the network, and undermine any future attempt to move back to ethical SEO techniques as the threat of penalty will always remain.

If the answer for brands which have already gone down this route is to turn a blind eye to the activities of their agencies, then I'm afraid that the bigger the brand the more likely the fall will be sudden, public, and disastrous for PR as well as for their SEO.

JC Penny's brand value has been tarnished, and just like it was for Ratners, that can be fatal for the underlying value of a business.

It's not likely that JC Penny will see £500 million wiped off the value of their business because they failed to keep up with what their SEO agency was doing, but as the publicity surrounding Google's results and the SEO industry that surrounds it grows, it won't be long before we see the stock market move as the result of an unethical SEO bending the rules too far, too publically.

SEO agencies should be thinking much more intelligently about their backlink strategies for their clients. White hat SEO can be just as effective as Black Hat, and has a huge amount of positive value over the longer term. Sure, it might take more time to get the great quality content in place to help you build those ethical links, but it will happen.

Of course, if you're a really smart agency you'll be looking to take advantage of other innovations in Google's algorithm that can allow you to perform heroic feats of SEO mountaineering without compromising your ethical stance.

Don't believe me? There's innovation rolling out from Google every day. It doesn't take a genius to realise how powerful some of those changes can be for big brand SEO.