Google Favoring New Spam Websites?

There has been a lot of talk in the SEO community about the future of SEO. Many companies and bloggers believe that SEO is on the way out, or even already died. The reason why this debate has arisen is due to some unusually weird rankings on Google.

If we take the SEO industry for example, but the same has applied across the board for all industries. Many SEO companies that have been established high on Google’s rankings for many years are starting to lose their positioning.

There is no reason why they should, their linking building and onsite SEO is up to a high standard, regular blog posts, social media updates. So why is this happening?

Loss in Google Rankings

On Google UK, for the keyword ‘SEO UK’, there has been significant moving of results within the past 2 months. Obviously we expect small amounts of movement from time to time, but over the past few weeks there has been some colossal changes. I’m not just talking about on the first page rankings, but the first 5 pages.

Let's start from the beginning. Companies that have been holding the top 5 positions on Google have been there for some time, and deservedly so. Over the past couple of weeks, we have noticed some worrying changes. Jumping straight in at position 2 is a website that has held that position for nearly 5 weeks. Their domain was purchased less than 6 weeks ago, Page Rank 0, 23 backlinks to date and 48 pages indexed in Google.

So how are they ranked so high for such a competitive keyword? After a little research, I found that they have rebranded and submitted a change of a web address in Google Webmasters Tools, along with a straightforward 301 redirect. A direct from which website though? A website that got severely penalized after the Panda update and pretty much disappeared off the face of the web.

Image Licensed Under Attribution

All the old links they had pointing to their old website, now points to their new one, so they now get credit for these links. But since Google punished them for these spam links last year, why is their new website benefiting?

Why indeed! It looks like Google will give you credit for spam links and position your site extremely high on their results for competitive keywords, almost immediately. But hold on, I have seen this happen before, by the same company!

This is the third time this company has done this. Eventually Google does look at the quality of the links in more depth and again, they will disappear, but this could take months. In the mean time, they are reaping the rewards and high volumes of traffic to their site. Remember, because they are ranked high in this time period, they are pushing established companies further down the rankings, which will affect their business.

So, What is Google Telling Us?

Well, at the minute, if you have thousands of thousands of backlinks for your keywords, no matter if they are spam or not, you will continue to get ranked! All you need to do is purchase another domain, a change of address in your Webmaster Tools, along with a 301 redirect and wait for a couple of weeks to be ranked!

Yes, they will only be there for a few months, but how much traffic will they receive within those months? How many orders? How much money will they make? As soon as the site starts losing it's rankings, buy a new domain and start again! How is this fair Google? Hopefully in 2013 Google will address this problem with a quality update.

  Kev Massey

About the Guest Author:

by Kev Massey from seo3d.org, author of Search Engine Optimisation and SEO Services in the UK.