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Thank goodness Google had the decency to wait until after Valentine's Day, therefore saving my bacon from the wrath of an enraged girlfriend.
Who says they don't have a heart?
To lift what I've just posted on Google+ regarding this.
The outreach to bloggers wouldn't have triggered this. It's a combination of something else.
First are the pretty extensive collection of exact match/targeted keyword anchor texts in blogrolls that are clearly link-farms.
The second? A glorified link network of UK regional newspapers. Interflora has been sending out editorial pieces to local papers with targeted anchor text.
Interestingly, all those papers that have been hit in the article on the David Naylor website can be tracked back to 2013 Johnston Publishing Ltd.
How many papers do you know that allow you to do a bespoke editorial piece with chosen links in it? Not many. How many media companies let you do it across the whole network? No legitimate ones, that's for sure.
Looks like regular editorials or features might be safe. This, however, was nothing more than a glorified link network.?
The thing that frustrates me is that it was a manual penalty. I mean, it's a deserved penalty, but I would have loved for this to have been algorithmic. There are a plethora of sites out there that rank with blatant exact match anchor text links placed on blogrolls or homepages, yet nothing is done about it. It takes a manual review for the penalty to be put in place. Figures Google would go after a big brand, but what about people in smaller niches that don't have these big brands, but are equally at an unfair advantage against company's who are blatantly buying links like these?
It's the one update that I'm rooting for this year - some improvement in the algorithm to detect these en masse bought links and finally start clearing up the SERPs. Social Media/Penguin refreshes can wait, as far as I'm concerned.
Just shows how much Google still lives in a link-dominated world.
Pointed this out to a developer colleague today. He said "Why are Google punishing users? If someone searches for 'Interflora' Google knows they're looking for Interflora, so why serve them an inferior result?".
If one were the conspiracy theory type, they'd notice that a PPC result is still there. Get banned on Google organic = improve PPC spend on brand search = more people click PPC result (because they have to) = more money in Google's pocket...
It doesn't make sense to do that and I said the same thing, but they do have a nice juice Adwords listing that users can find and will make Google money..
I gave my wife flowers on Valentine's Day, she links to me on her site. Will she get banned now too?
Oh Tad that makes you a black hat I'm afraid. Google will now nuke your website and your wife's and anyone's you have ever spoken with at any point in time.
Including you! And... me. Damn.
I sent a postcard to Shelli Walsh, Julie Joyce and James Agate. I'll ask them to burn it as soon as possible.
Are Branded3 still Interflora's agency? Anyone heard from them?
No, Interflora recently moved their PPC and SEO to Croud. Apparently they've been trying to remove these links ever since they took over the campaign.
Yes I think they are.
They thought this is a cool idea to build links... I don't know about you guys, but the text they prepared for bloggers looks like some spam comment to me.
Is it just me, or did Interflora get exactly what they asked for? High rankings on Valentines Day and following up to it (which could make up for sales for an entire month that's coming from organic search), which probably accounts for a huge amount of sales in a short period of time? Maybe they were thinking they could start the recovery process the day after valentines day to minimize the damage and get back on their feet with Google in about a month; but then again, a month is a long time and a lot of missed sales, and that's a short period of time...
Who knows. I'm probably just rambling to no one at this point.
J.C. Penny did something similar a few years ago, although I doubt they intended to get penalized. They ramped up their efforts in the months leading up to the holidays, then shortly afterwards, they were penalized. It would be interesting to see the profits gained vs profits lost.
I'm with you. They spammed the crap out of the SERPs. They're not "too big to fail," so they got hammered.
Feeling pity for the company for not even coming in serp for their own brand name.
Has anyone tried to crawl their site, it is pretty big, in fact very big for the number of products on offer. Tons of duplicate/thin/weak pages, I am not surprised this happened at all, and that is before you consider whatever off-site strategy they have been dabbling with!
Not ranking for one's brand name usually isn't tied to dupe problems.
I know, just saying it looks like they don't seem to know what they are doing at all!
I think Now time come to ignore Google and do the flag march against Matt Cutts who just create the rules every day and serve unrelevant result more.... Google....is now become more selfish Evil... and they needs just money.......... and want to live in the world alone.... by putting banned on all others.... I want to ask here.. why most famous people in SEO community not doing oppose to Google or not doing claim...?