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I love the abandonment of the common thought, well it must be their blogger outreach. It's not - it's their paid links!
Exactly. So many other big warning signs on this one. Just wish Google could start detecting obvious paid-links into its algorithm a bit better. Easier said than done, but would love to see that as the big update this year.
Paid links, low quality directory links, irrelevant guest posts, clumsy blogger outreach that would be viewed as a link scheme by Google. It's not surprising they were penalised at all.
I wrote a post about the situation here - http://www.dgseo.co.uk/why-interflora-got-penalised (my blog isn't finished yet, wasn't planning to really publicize it until I'd written some more posts but hey, have a look anyway).
Good post, David - I just shared it for you :-)
Thanks Steve, I appreciate it. Anthony Shapley's article is also very insightful. It's likely it was a combination of the newspaper PR drop and a resultant scrutiny of Interflora's link profile (unearthing further quality issues) that caused the penalty.
David that's some really nice breakdown and analysis. Well done!
A quick look in their link profile and its pretty obvious why they got wacked by the big G. Spammy as it gets.
What I don't get is that the agency concerned have been working with Interflora for years. Fair play, you used to able to get away with a lot more web spam and the amount the agency put out for Interflora has brought them loads of traffic over the years. No client could complain about that.
A conversation Jan 2012 going something along the lines of 'Google is changing the way it ranks sites, we have performed to the best of our ability for you for all these years but the 2012 SEO strategy is to clean anything that could be a problem to protect you' wouldn't have gone amiss.
I bet the client is preparing a law suit right now, and the agency deserves it for lack of forward planning. Not to mention feeding bloggers lies as to why the links should be removed. They are a disgrace to our industry.
Ha, there is my bad for jumping the comments before reading the article. Awesome analysis done there. Bravo.