Manipulating Google Search PageRanks
As expected, many business owners and marketing managers take on the challenge of ranking at the top of Google search results. The race to increase their visibility is reasonable as ranking first for a keyword in Google sends 33% of all traffic from that keyword and more traffic could mean more revenue. To produce the most accurate search results, Google has a set of guidelines that companies must follow. However, there are many companies that have overlooked the guidelines and were penalized as they attempted to rank higher.
Washington Post sold links on their blogroll without using a no follow tag when linking to a site. Link selling is a violation, so their PageRank dropped from PR7 to PR5. If this had happened in 2016, the loss of traffic over two months would’ve been 76.4 million users. WordPress hosted 168,000 articles about high-cost advertising keywords which were written by a third party in exchange for a fee. This is called creating doorway pages, which are sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries. Their penalty was that their site’s home page didn’t rank for two days. BBC has also been an offender for using unnatural links. These are artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links that are typically the result of buying links or participating in links schemes to manipulate a site’s ability to rank.
More examples include BMW, Genius, Overstock, and Home Depot. BMW redirected user to their company site for “used car” searches. This violation is described as cloaking. Genius asked bloggers to link to its lyrics content in exchange for tweeting the posts from bloggers. They received an unnatural link penalty that lasted for 10 days, which would be a traffic loss of 3.88 million users today. In 2011, Overstock.com offered discounts to schools in exchange for specific links back to their website. This resulted in a paid link violation, an unnatural placement of a link which is paid for with intentions of increasing rankings. Home Depot was found guilty of hidden links. They asked recommended providers to share a link to Home Depot with anchor and the link didn’t have to be visible.
Even Google has had to penalize themselves. Google bought links for a campaign to promote Chrome browser, a paid link violation. Google AdWords was also found cloaking in 2010, so they had their ranks degraded. Whether or not these companies attempted to bypass Google guidelines intentionally or accidentally, they found themselves being penalized and losing a lot of traffic for the duration of their penalty. The idea of manipulating one’s PageRank is quite interesting and the amount of ways to do so are plenty. Though it is not right to do so, the motivation behind it is understandable as being one of the top search results for a keyword is surely great for business.