Rumor: Bigmouthmedia Hand Removed from Google

seobook on Mon, 2006-02-20 11:21.

Rumours & Scandal

48 comments

JamesLittle recently notified TW that Bigmouthmedia has been removed from Google.

It appears as though Bigmouthmedia, arguably the most well known SEO agency in the UK, has been banned from Google. They have no PageRank, and their site can't be found in Google anymore, even when you search for their brand name!

Anyone know what happened to the boys at Bigmouthmedia? Hand removal? Just a glitch?

Comments

perhaps this...?

Jill on Mon, 2006-02-20 11:50.

Well, they're still in Google's cache.

And Google's text cache reveals a possible hint if they are indeed penalized.

They have a huge amount of content stuffed into a little tiny frame on the bottom left corner of their home page. Doesn't really seem like it's meant for their users, but who's to say...

BTW, I love that TW outs stuff now. It makes me laugh.

“exclusive”

Bigmouth News on Fri, 2006-02-24 12:16.

Apparently this site: http://www.directtraffic.org/PageRank_Review.htm will be publishing a BMM statement, all will be revealed…?

”bigmouthmedia has asked Direct Traffic to publish a statement on their behalf, they have assured us that we will be the first ones to have this statement.”

” More “exclusive” news from BMM coming soon”

There is also an open forum launched on the BMM issue – Brave…
http://www.directtraffic.org/forum_category_bigmouthmedia.aspx

I don't really consider it

seobook on Mon, 2006-02-20 12:43.

I don't really consider it outing AFTER a site has already been whacked, IMHO.

Cloaking

IncrediBILL on Mon, 2006-02-20 12:43.

That'll do it every time!

True, after they've been whacked it's public humiliation, not outing ;)

that is going to hurt!

GerBot on Mon, 2006-02-20 12:48.

that is going to hurt!
Google could not cripple BMW but they can certainly destroy BigMouth Media today.

Unless they hire a gun PR agency and some poor 17 year old employees becomes their scapegoat I don't see these guys keeping all their clients or employees.

Ahh..

JamesLittle on Mon, 2006-02-20 12:59.

I must remember to login when submiting stories, although the original source was Nathan from UK-Netmarketing chinwag list and Aaron edited my post ;)

They state(d) on their page that they get:

search engine optimisation:
Yahoo.com, position 10

However they don't seem to be in the first 10 pages, let alone one of the first 10 Serps - does that suggest that google are not the only ones to take action or they just aren't as good as they used to be on there? (Search for BigMouth Media and they are possition 5 on yahoo, so they are certainly still on there).

Hi James

seobook on Mon, 2006-02-20 13:15.

Hi James
my bad... I get it as an email if you suggest a story. if you login and submit then it is a submission.

I did not put your name on it off the go because I did not want to without your permission (thought there may have been a reason it was submitted as an email instead of a post).

I also emailed you back and and asked you if you wanted your name on it, etc...but am unsure if you replied to that email yet.

I added your name to the post above.

Onward and upward...let me stuff a bit more content in here
seo
search engine optimization
roi focused search marketing
search engine placement

is there some sort of program I could use to do this?

more info...

seobook on Mon, 2006-02-20 14:21.

information is still coming in from various sources:

They just had a mass exodus of staff last month, losing around 9 people over 2 or 3 months (out of 25 staff), most of whom were fairly experienced staff (leaving quite a lot of "new" staff).
They were hugely reliant on the rankings for sales pitches - this is going to hurt them a lot, although they are greatly short staffed just now so I don't think it's going to be a huge issue! ;)

LOL

AussieWebmaster on Mon, 2006-02-20 15:27.

That's one way to get around dropping sales... fire your staff and keep one or two who are busy keeping exisiting clients happy and in the fold.

IncrediWrong Again..

seomike on Mon, 2006-02-20 16:00.

Sorry Bill they're not cloaking. It looks like a cloak but.. Turn off the styles in you browser. Now go and view the text cache vs the cache with styles turned off. They're exactly the same site minus the images (strip=1 takes the images off).

Now view their site with the css off and the normal cache with the css off. They're the same.

They did stuff a ton of content into a scroll enabled div using css. But I can't say for sure thats what did them in since in IE it looks like a perfectly legit text scrolling application.

Maybe Matt Cutts will explain that one as well as SEO inc or SEO guy... Who knows but as per the cloaking.. nope try again.

As per myself:

All that text that is in the div that's scrollable (FF) or has the neat looking fade-in fade-out (IE) doesn't look bad if you see it working in the site as an application.

The only gray area is right below it in the code. There are a series of "dropdown" css classes that are set to visibility:hidden

They look like they are suppost to be triggered by a mouse over in the main nav which sets the class to visible. Still legit if viewing as a user (if they worked lol) but looks real ify in the code since no drop downs occur, the vis is set to hidden and it looks like you're stuffing bottom content.

My advice - Kill the dropdown css and go make a javascript dropdown in Macromedia Fireworks (Code generates the same hidden/visible css but it all in javascript so the engines can't penalize ya) and put in for a reinclussion. If they tripped a hidden content filter explain the java was suppost to change the css class to visible on a mouse over in the nav.

Basically sum it up like this. If Jill (highrankings.com) made her dropdowns hard coded divs at the bottom of her site with css set to be hidden on page load and were able to be triggered to visible or hide, she'd be a strong canidate to be hand removed from the SERPS too...

Ok so we can stop throwing them under the bus. They've learned their css lesson the hard way, move on...

--

Jill on Mon, 2006-02-20 16:21.

Quote:

Basically sum it up like this. If Jill (highrankings.com) made her dropdowns hard coded divs at the bottom of her site with css set to be hidden on page load and were able to be triggered to visible or hide, she'd be a strong canidate to be hand removed from the SERPS too...

Why bring me into it? Wouldn't it affect anyone who did this?

It sure would, and you are

seomike on Mon, 2006-02-20 16:35.

It sure would, and you are right It would affect anyone that put it hard code. In theory. I think if you have a big name it helps for a more line by line review from SE and SEO.

Now I know not to waist my time on a hard code drop down navigation I've been working on and off again for a few years. In the back of my mind I was thinking ,"is their a risk to this"? "would I implement this on a client site and be able to sleep at night"? I got my answer :)

I don't think it may have

seobook on Mon, 2006-02-20 16:38.

I don't think it may have been meant as a personal thing there Jill... just thinking he was trying to say that a few coding differences are the differences between one site and the next.

SEOMike

IncrediBILL on Mon, 2006-02-20 16:46.

Don't get me angry... lol

I know all about CSS and that wasn't what I missed the first time I looked at as I noticed most of the similarities, but there looked like a big chunk of cached text that seemed missing in the site but I finally located it. Turns out it was a browser glitch that led me to that conclusion.

Some days ya just can't win for losing.

I'm not convinced at all

John Andrews on Mon, 2006-02-20 17:43.

Sure it's real convenient to look at current source and pick out something that *might* have been *iffy* and blame it, but to commit as you do seomike? Nah.

There's plenty of CSS on the web using onmouseover hide/unhide for legitimate content (especially nav) and I don't buy that it got this not-very-spammy site dropped. Sure I might be wrong on that, but if I am then this whole abide-by-restrictive-TOS-or-get-dropped thing is far too unstable to support itself for very long. I doubt that more than I doubt the CSS dropdowns got them dropped.

One other consideration is that in the SEO serps, even a tiny little iffy thing can get you dropped. I might believe that, except that if it were true the resulting choas in the SEO field would be worse for the big SE's than the status quo. They are doing well right now reigning in the eggregious offenders and b*tchslapping the clients, while avoiding having to actually define "acceptable" optimization.

My money is on business matters, such as clients ratting out the SEO firm, other activities (links, sales, promoting same), or technical issues off-page.

hidden txt - that can't be serious

claus on Mon, 2006-02-20 18:18.

... although Matt Cutts also says something like that, I find it hard to believe that hidden text should be taken seriously at all, much less penalized.

Well, perhaps they do so, but I just don't think it's a reasonable thing to do. In these "web 2.0" times with dynamic pages and all, you can surely provide a lot of good user value by hiding parts of pages for those visitors that don't do something actively to view those parts of the page. (example)

IOW, if Google really looks after hidden text, now would be a good time to stop doing that. Or, alternatively start ignoring it in stead of penalizing it. After all, if it's hidden, ignoring it seems pretty appropriate. However, the example above is a pretty useful page, it's just not everything that's visible at the same time, so ignoring the hidden parts would also mean ignoring useful and relevant content.

---

[this part removed - be faster next time - graywolf got some of it]

*cough* radar *cough*

- Oh, and I agree with John Andrews on "other factors"

Matt's Links

graywolf on Mon, 2006-02-20 18:34.

Btw. can you guys guess how many backlinks said firm has (...) from comments on Matt Cutts' blog?

Matt's comment links are all with link condom's, gotta love yahoo for ignoring that though.

Maybe it had something to do

creative666 on Tue, 2006-02-21 02:06.

Maybe it had something to do with the 30,000+ pages they used to keep alive at search.bigmouthmedia.com. They had abit of a clean up and removed that now, they used to buy alot of links as well, but who knows :)

Duplicate content??

Londoner on Tue, 2006-02-21 02:57.

http://www.bigmouthmedia.com/live/articles/bigmouthmedia_goes_dutch_with_visitscotland.asp

http://www.bigmouthmedia.com/live/articles/visitscotland_goes_dutch_with_bigmouthmedia.asp

Haven't looked through all the SEO related articles they have on their site, but spotted this when I first heard the rumour Monday morning.

It's never going to help your rankings with duplicate content such as on the pages above

--

Jill on Tue, 2006-02-21 08:29.

Quote:

It's never going to help your rankings with duplicate content such as on the pages above

But that's not gonna hurt them and certainly not get them banned either.

but...

Londoner on Tue, 2006-02-21 08:59.

..this is just one example that was visible from the home page. They have hundreds, if not thousands of news articles/press releases throughout their site, and if they have done the same to these other articles then it wouldn't suprise me if this was part of the reason they were banned.
You can't have two copies of the same article on your site with varying titles, especially when you're an SEO company.
It may be the case that this was just an honest mistake and is the only occurence of duplicate content.

I'm not saying this was the reason they were banned, but just that they should be much more careful. From Google's webmaster guildines:
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

From my understanding it was because of this revolving text in the bottom left-hand corner of the homepage that they have been banned. Here's what the page looks like to a search engine. Notice the revolving text that makes up a third of the page's content!

Much ado about nothing?

Jill on Tue, 2006-02-21 14:34.

I just happened to be looking at the SERP for the phrase search engine marketing (at Google) and BMM is on page 2. So apparently they're not banned, or they never were banned, or they're back?

Yes, it is back

cornwall on Tue, 2006-02-21 14:38.

bigmouthmedia.com is back in Google

That query yesterday did not show them on Google's index.

Note the cache

IncrediBILL on Tue, 2006-02-21 15:58.

Now shows the page like the user sees it.

Shock.

I'm sure SEOMike will tell me I'm IncrediWrong again.

Not.

Doesn't look the same to me.

Jill on Tue, 2006-02-21 16:13.

Doesn't look the same to me. The copy in the text cache has links, and what you see now on the site itself is that text, no longer in a little framed window, but showing up a bit at a time. But it doesn't appear to have the links like it does in the text cache.

Perhaps they were never banned at all and it was just a glitch? I find it hard to believe they would have been banned and reinstated that quickly.

If there was nothing wrong

mick g on Tue, 2006-02-21 16:35.

If there was nothing wrong with the site in the first place then they would not of changed it, would they ?

--

Jill on Tue, 2006-02-21 16:55.

Mick if you're talking to me, I sure didn't say there was never anything wrong with the site, I just said: "Perhaps they were never banned at all."

Personally, I've seen a lot more blatant spam be allowed to remain in Google. From what I saw on this BMM site, the text was all visible, just not all that noticeable. There might have been other stuff they cleaned up. I didn't personally look very long or carefully at what they were doing.

There were some Fortune 500 sites outed a few months ago using actual real hidden text that are still using it, and not banned even though Google/Cutts knew about them.

Which is why I was surprised if this case was an actual Google penalization. Has Matt C. made a statement on this one? If this was a banning, it is kind of funny as to which sites they penalize and which they ignore. So far, it seems like if you're not in the US you better watch out!

Nah I was not aiming at you

mick g on Tue, 2006-02-21 17:14.

Nah I was not aiming at you in particular Jill it was just an open comment :)

I does seem strange though that a site is removed or looking like it has been removed only to reappear 48 hours later when google say they don't do "hand jobs" , the only other time I can recall of a site being removed for 48 hours was the toxiclemon saga of Christmas 2003, I dare say there have been others removed but have not made it through on the gossip grapevine

I wonder if a one man band (or woman) working from his/her bedroom doing the same sort of search engine spamming would get the same treatment as a large company has with these latest removals and re inclusions with BMW and bigmouthmedia, hmmm something tells me this would not be the case, corporate branded yeah, little johnny from his bedroom, nah I doubt it

I have seen other well known

seobook on Tue, 2006-02-21 17:39.

I have seen other well known SEO sites get hammered for content stuff like that and then change it and be back where they were in well under a week.

Seems like Google is trying to blur the line on many things though, doesn't it?

It appears....

Londoner on Wed, 2006-02-22 03:13.

...that the old scrolling text they had in the bottom left-hand carner has now been replaced by a Flash app.
It will now not be indexable by search engines and will not count towards their rankings.

Google is still indexing the old cache and so rankings haven't been affected just yet, but I reckon that once it starts picking up the Flash app instead of the scrolling text, they'll lose one or two places for SEO related terms.

I'm slightly disappointed in Google for re-including them so quickly to be honest. Like with BMW they have fixed the issues with their site, but I feel there should be an absolute minimum re-inclusion time of a week for cases like these.

More bad news for BMM and their clients

Londoner on Wed, 2006-02-22 06:45.

edit: removed names of sites.

BigMouthMedia have refuted

Nick Wilsdon on Wed, 2006-02-22 06:27.

BigMouthMedia have refuted the story (in an email to a UKNM member)

Quote:

Just a quick email to alert you to the situation which arose over the weekend. During a reshuffle at Google, the bigmouthmedia.com site was removed from their index.
We can confirm that we immediately contacted our partners at Google who confirmed what we knew: that our site was NOT removed due to any breach of Google's published guidelines and following a review at Google, we were immediately reindexed and are now back at No1.

In the face of some ungentlemanly behaviour on the part of our competitors, we would like to reassure you that at bigmouthmedia we champion ethical, white-hat SEO and in particular Google's guidelines, and have done so since long before it ever became trendy.

Of course we've ruffled competitors feathers from day one with our ethical stance, our growing client list and our marketplace strength so it's not too surprising then that some of our competitors (who would appear not to have seen a Google shuffle before) got excited and contacted our clients claiming we had been 'banned from Google'.

This is not the case and we are back, where we belong, as the UK's leading SEO Agency !

Fair enough, but then TW regular Jason Duke points the finger to Alitalia, a BMM client. If you turn off the CSS you can see what he means.

Seems this hasn't quite gone away...

I don't think we want to

seobook on Wed, 2006-02-22 07:02.

I don't think we want to point at too many more client sites...I dont think it is necissary.

Bigmouthmedia.com

Paul Zig Zag on Wed, 2006-02-22 07:19.

Back in the listings and doing particularly well for the UK spelling of Search Engine Optimisation, however they're way down the listings for the US spelling.

Back in the listings and

Nick Wilsdon on Wed, 2006-02-22 07:31.

Quote:

Back in the listings and doing particularly well for the UK spelling of Search Engine Optimisation

Well all those links for one day of exclusion, almost worth it I'd say. Maybe we have a new form of linkbait?

As a client of BMM I'd be impressed they had recovered so quickly. Beats the hell out of being with some small time SEO who gets you banned for a 3 months and can't do anything about it ;)

Kino mentioned me and my

JasonD on Wed, 2006-02-22 09:18.

Kino mentioned me and my comments to the (excellent) UKNM email list where this story broke. I purposely hadn't commented here or any other forums on this issue but that is about to change :)

My response to the UKNM list was due to a statement by the Sales Director at BBM and is copy and pasted below. My public response to the list follows.

Scott, BBM's Sales Director said in am email to Keiron, the head of Online Operations at Game.net

Quote:

Kieron Smith wrote:
>> I had this update from Big Mouth Media this morning:
>>
>> "Hi Kieron
>>
>> Just a quick email to alert you to the situation which arose over the
>> weekend. During a reshuffle at Google, the bigmouthmedia.com site was
>> removed from their index.
>>
>> We can confirm that we immediately contacted our partners at Google who
>> confirmed what we knew: that our site was NOT removed due to any breach
>> of Google's published guidelines and following a review at Google, we
>> were immediately reindexed and are now back at No1.
>>
>> In the face of some ungentlemanly behaviour on the part of our
>> competitors, we would like to reassure you that at bigmouthmedia we
>> champion ethical, white-hat SEO and in particular Google's guidelines,
>> and have done so since long before it ever became trendy.
>>
>> Of course we've ruffled competitors feathers from day one with our
>> ethical stance, our growing client list and our marketplace strength so
>> it's not too surprising then that some of our competitors (who would
>> appear not to have seen a Google shuffle before) got excited and
>> contacted our clients claiming we had been 'banned from Google'.
>>
>> This is not the case and we are back, where we belong, as the UK's
>> leading SEO Agency !
>>
>> If you have any concerns whatsoever please feel free to contact me
>> directly on 07985 207536.
>>
>> Best regards
>>
>>
>> Scott Boocock
>> Sales Director
>>
>> Mobile: 07985 207 536
>> Main Line: 0845 130 0022 (Local Rate Number)
>> www.bigmouthmedia.com - the full search agency"
>>
>> Best
>>
>> Kieron
>>
>>
>> Kieron Smith
>> Head of Online Operations
>>
>> GAME Digital Ltd
>> Direct line: +44 (0) 1256 784032
>> Fax: +44 (0) 1256 784007
>>
>> mailto:kieron.smith@game.net
>>
>> http://www.game.net
>> http://www.gamegroup.plc.uk/
>>
>> Why not become an affiliate?

Keiron posted the above to the UKNM list and my response was.

Quote:

Hmmmmm, Scott said,
> In the face of some ungentlemanly behaviour on the part of our
> competitors, we would like to reassure you that at bigmouthmedia we
> champion ethical, white-hat SEO and in particular Google's guidelines,
> and have done so since long before it ever became trendy.

If a bird quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, looks like a duck yet
professes to be a swan what bird is it ?

I'd say it is more likely to be a duck but we all have to make our own
minds up - Here is a client of BMM's - http://www.alitalia.co.uk/flights/

Take a look at the page with CSS turned off (Simple in Firefox with the
web developer extension - harder in Internet Explorer) then take a peek
at all those links and hidden text. It "could be" interpreted by a
search algorithm as spam.

Is it spam, is it ethical? Well that depends on what and how you define
spam and ethics.

It is fair to argue that ethics should be towards the clients' bottom
line rather than the search engines' and I have to doff my hat to BMM as
Alitalia ranks for the phrases they want to.

It is also fair to define spam from 2 opposing points of view.

I believe that intent is the arbitrar of whether a page/site is SPAM or not.

Do you instinctively

* Place a keyword in your title tag?
* Register a domain name with a keyword?
* Post links to your sites in sig files?
* Look at that little green bar when surfing?

Whereas Matt Cutts, the head of spam detection and removal over at
Google says that spam is:

Lots and lots of search engine optimization is white-hat and not spam
at all. Things like making a site more crawlable, tweaking the words
on a site based on what users type in or what you see in your server
logs, and gathering links by coming up with creative ideas or
services that make people link to you naturally. To me (and Google),
spam is search engine optimization that is outside our quality
guidelines--things like hidden text, hidden links, doorway pages filled
with gibberish words that do a sneaky JavaScript redirect, and so on.

Bottom line for me is that as BMM are a corporate that plays in a VERY
high tech field they need to be aware of issues and risks for
themselves. On top of that, their clients need to be made aware of the
risks. Do Alitalia know they may run the risk of losing their primary UK
domain name? I have no idea but it's definately a very real risk and as
long as the they are aware then it is good SEO.

A much bigger issue than whether BMM are ethical or not is security.

No company should open up their site to security flaws.

http://tinyurl.com/frn4r

shows an example on BMM's site that could deliver some very real
problems for anyone visiting the BMM site. If similar simple programming
errors occur on their client sites I'd personally think twice about
working with such a business that can't get simple programming delivered
securely.

The question has to be asked why have I had this rant?

The answer is simple.

Scott said,

> In the face of some ungentlemanly behaviour on the part of our
> competitors

Although I hadn't commented on any of the industry bulletin boards I
know pretty much every single person on there and most of them are true,
upstanding, effective and thorough SEOers. Discussion of the industry,
search, algorithm changes and occasions (such as an SEO business being
banned from a search engine) are common and normal. It helps the
business of SEO as (truth be known) no one outside of the search
engineers themselves knows the exact algorithm. Analysing events
delivers real and tangible knowledge to the community as a whole. I
guarantee that BMM resource has learnt a lot from those communities , as
can be seen from their (arguably spammy) search directory, client sites,
link purchases, poor mans' cloaking etc.

Just cos you say you are ethical doesn't make you so and just because
the industry comments about an event doesn't make it ungentlemanly.

At this moment in time I think there is no swan at BMM simply a duck. A
mighty talented duck but a duck none the less.

Scott, if you or your colleagues want to give me a call I'll happily
help you fix your security problem.

Kind Regards

I have heard rumours that in fact matters go a LOT deeper than this, but more may well be revealed in time. For me BMM are nothing but a quacking spamming duck and for that I respect them immensely.

Unfortunately for them they got caught quacking too loudly!

huh?

Jill on Wed, 2006-02-22 09:56.

Quote:

It will now not be indexable by search engines and will not count towards their rankings.
Google is still indexing the old cache and so rankings haven't been affected just yet, but I reckon that once it starts picking up the Flash app instead of the scrolling text, they'll lose one or two places for SEO related terms.

Huh? That doesn't make any sense. They ARE back in the rankings, and the content that was previously in that little frame thingee, DOES show in the cache. So it is counting towards their rankings.

They're ranked for what is seen in the cache like any other site, unless somehow Google has something else to rank them on.

All signs point to a Google glitch if you ask me. Which is why forums outing this kind of stuff really sucks. What if it was YOUR site that got glitched?

(I'm in no way sticking up for this company or not sticking up for them. I don't know them and have barely heard of them. I don't know if they use spam tactics or not. I'm simply going by the facts as presented here and elsewhere. They were missing, and they're back, and it was all very quick. Just like what happens in a glitch. Could and does happen to many sites all the time.)

To me the only thing to learn from all this is to be careful when sending out a lynch mob.

I'm simply going by the

John Andrews on Wed, 2006-02-22 13:27.

Quote:

I'm simply going by the facts as presented here and elsewhere.

err.. that'd be alleged facts, eh Jill ? :-)

Kidding aside, outing is such an interesting activity. This BadMouthMedia case is just an example. You out them, they get publicity and links and traffic. Maybe they get banned, but maybe for just a few days. Because you are in fact outing public relations and marketing experts, you are also providing ample opportunity for spin (in front of all those new eyeballs that had never heard of them before). So we get to see how well they spin (a metric of creativity and industry expertise, imho. It seems BadMouthMedia has done pretty well so far). In the best cases of outing, we then get to watch as the spin flips the coin of accountability back to the outers and detractors... can they spin it back their way? Or do they react like juveniles, and miss the new reverse publicity opportunity for PR and name recognition and backlinks? Really.. a backlink to a forum post is not equivalent to a backlink to a marketing firm's corporate website, is it?

And then there's the collateral damage... also interesting to analyse. Who chimes in? How? All those new eyeballs... and the ThreadJacking™...my oh my that's fun, too. Who starts getting top ranks for search referrals on the popular queries? And posts about it (lol)? And then the blogging...

SEO blog post about "Any publicity is good publicity.." appearing in 5...4....3...2....

Good point, John! Can we

Jill on Wed, 2006-02-22 15:04.

Good point, John!

Can we start a thread at how Big Daddy ate my site for breakfast and lowered it down a few ranks? (That's what I get for spamming! Or did I?) Maybe even the WallStreet Journal will take an interest! Better yet, hang on, and I'll post an anonymous tip here about it...

Google Shuffle?

KarenS on Thu, 2006-02-23 08:14.

I'm not sure that I've ever seen a site completely fall out of the SERPs as part of a glitch, but I do agree that all the links are good for Bigmouthmedia's own SERPs now that they have been reincluded.

I question that they have 'partners at Google' and I was put out a bit that they suggested that they had not changed their site (when Google cache still shows the old site) but am willing to accept that a lot of clients will be fooled by their marketing department.

What I think is the real worry for them is the exposure which Tesco, Sainsbury and, in particular, Alitalia are getting for their CSS hidden text and links.

If their clients are CSS spamming then how long will it be before they start getting banned themselves?

banned?

wheel on Thu, 2006-02-23 08:29.

>>>If their clients are CSS spamming then how long will it be before they start getting banned themselves?

You know, I don't know. But it makes me really wonder. I spend so much time reading about bleeding edge techniques - then every once in a while it becomes clear that old school basic techniques still get around the algo. Makes me want to re-evaluate and think about putting up some pos site full of keyword stuffing, hidden text and iframes and see how long I make money and before I get a hand ban.

Just like link networks. Horrible ugly things ;) that apparently the SE's have detected and don't work anymore. Except I think they DO still work magnificently as long as you don't get reported and someone at Google hand reviews you. Advanced network detection? Maybe. Maybe not. Not sure that makes much sense to implement if you can still rank with offpage and hidden text using CSS.

I'm not sure that I've ever

seobook on Thu, 2006-02-23 09:37.

I'm not sure that I've ever seen a site completely fall out of the SERPs as part of a glitch

I have. And it was a highly advertised, well branded, old and legitimate PageRank 7 site.

It was NOT a glitch that led

JasonD on Thu, 2006-02-23 09:50.

It was NOT a glitch that led to no visibility in the SERPs

I have

Jill on Thu, 2006-02-23 09:52.

Quote:

I'm not sure that I've ever seen a site completely fall out of the SERPs as part of a glitch

I've seen it back during the Google dances of yore. My own site would often go missing for hours and then be back. Pretty scary stuff, but it never amounted to anything.

This Big Daddy update seems very similar to those types of updates where the rankings change from minute to minute.

I still say it was a glitch due to the major database restructuring G is doing right now.

or maybe...

seobook on Thu, 2006-02-23 09:56.

I still say it was a glitch due to the major database restructuring G is doing right now.

It is easy for all of us to speculate one way or the other, but if Big Mouth Media thinks it was a glitch the proof will be in the pudding.

If the page reverts back to the version that was live when the "glitch" occured we will know that BMM is offering more than talk and that they are willing to have their site and code match their words.

The SEO Witch Hunts

AussieWebmaster on Thu, 2006-02-23 11:12.

Okay this is really getting out of control... I am getting 10 emails a day about new posts to this thread.... and double that from SEW forums... can we put a fork in this one?

I have looked at this in general and used a phrase from shor at SEW forums Google Catch and Release Program to look at what has happened over this and a couple of related topics recently.