Supersitious thinking and false conclusions about Google ranking algorithms

[djbaxter]

See:

Email Reputation Causes Penalties in Google Search Results
by Jake Ludington
May 29, 2011

When my traffic at JakeLudington.com suddenly dropped in early April, I thought I’d made some kind of change that was resulting in a technology failure. I was wrong. Everything appeared to load as it should. So why the sudden drop? I called around to a handful of friends and discovered I was not alone. Early April was the second round of Panda algorithm changes. With some additional digging, I got a tip from someone at Google who indicated Google was penalizing JakeLudington.com with some new measurements that penalize email behaviors for domains. In talking with a number of other online publishers who were also hit with a stiff penalty, including LockerGnome, it appears that one common theme is that we all have email newsletters.

Sounds pretty scary, doesn't it? But before you go off and make major changes to your email subscriptions or email formats, read on... down to the comments:

roshodgekiss
Hi Nancy, Matt Cutts from Google's Webspam team has confirmed that this is untrue (see comment below, the Campaign Monitor blog and Hacker News).

Matt Cutts "With some additional digging, I got a tip from someone at Google who indicated Google was penalizing JakeLudington.com with some new measurements that penalize email behaviors for domains."

Hi Jake, I'd be curious to get more info about this sentence, because it's not true. Do you mind if I ask who at Google you talked to?

Matt Cutts The part that's inaccurate is the headline "Email Reputation Causes Penalties in Google Search Results." That's not the case at all.

I've been replying on the Hacker News thread at [URL]http://news.ycombinator.com/it...[/URL]

This kind of hysteria and superstitious jumping to conclusions has always permeated the writings of Google watchers on SEO forums and blogs.

When you read this sort of thing, make sure your skeptic's cap is firmly planted on your head and read with a very critical eye.

 

[djbaxter]

See also Google Debunks Email Newsletter Metrics As Search Ranking Factor

Matt Cutts had to come in a debunk the wild theory. Matt said in a comment (although he had to post it several places and several different ways):

Sure, I'd be happy to clarify. When you submit a reconsideration request, if the webspam team has taken manual action in the past, we take another look at the site. We do that regardless of what you say in the the text of the reconsideration request. You could slip in "I was kidnapped by aliens, and the aliens said to do a reconsideration request" and we'd still take another look.

Just to make it concrete, it looks like you're talking about your site, right? And I believe a few years ago, your site linked to some lower-quality sites, the sort of sites that bought a lot of links. So the manual webspam team had taken manual action to trust your site less. Your site still ranked fine; we just didn't trust your links because of the sites you were linking to a few years ago.

Then in April 2011, you did a reconsideration request. You might have submitted it for email behavior, but that doesn't really matter. We saw that we'd taken manual action in the past, so that triggered a fresh look. The links to low-quality sites (the sorts of sites that bought links) were no longer there, so we revoked the manual action, and you got a "manual spam action revoked" message in your webmaster console. But the action was revoked because you were no longer linking to those sites, not for anything related to email. I hope that clears up what happened with your site, but just to be clear: it had nothing to do with your site's email reputation.
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