Economist gets slapping from Google
28th April 2008 by David North
So Google is following up on it’s mission to penalise high PageRank websites that sell links as they violate the Google guidelines.
It would seem the Economist has seen a significant PageRank drop which has been attributed to their practice of adding classified adverts at the bottom of their pages without the relevant robots.txt file or rel=”nofollow” attributes.
Firstly I think this is excellent work by Google I’m a strong believer in ethical SEO. In other words optimising what you have on a website not just conning Google into showing what are essentially erroronous results. This just isn’t good for the whole online community or Google in the long term.
By penalising such a high profile website I think it will make people sit up and listen that Google aren’t taking this lying down and also raises the profile of this guideline so that people that aren’t aware should perhaps check their code.
Whether the Economist knowingly did this is open to debate but as these links seem to be unrelated to a lot of the content on some pages the overall effectiveness of these incoming links has to have been lessened somewhat - Google is all about relevancy.
At the end of the day accurate results are what will keep Google going so I have no sympathy if you fall foul of the Google guidelines. In the long run it has to be said Google is managing to at least keep up with the more unscrupilous SEOs out there.
