SEO is a difficult topic for anybody new to the game. It's proved especially difficult for Forbes, where an article about "Google Hell" had the experts shaking their heads. Not to rag too much on Forbes, the article did present an opportunity for clarification about Google's supplemental index.
An opportunity so ripe, Google's Matt Cutts posts at length about, for those who still have questions. With some luck, we'll get two great posts from Matt this week, as we're told he plans to blog about Google's controversial link-buying spam reports before he goes on vacation.
Forbes' Andy Greenberg wrote an article "
"What the heck is Google Hell?" asks Marketing Pilgrim's
Well, Greenberg did kind of use the word "dungeon." Matt has pages of his own in the index and says it has more to do with PageRank than penalties. He then hints that if there's a sudden drop in rank that sends a page to the supplemental results, then a webmaster might want to check the quality of links.
But the real kicker of Cutts' response is his examination of an example cited in the article, where a condemned webmaster admits to "grey-area tactics like buying links."
A little digging, and Matt discovered that the webmaster had employed some pretty big no-no's like keyword spamming and excessive, unrelated reciprocal linking.
"Reciprocal links by themselves aren’t automatically bad," Cutts writes, "but we’ve communicated before that there is such a thing as excessive reciprocal linking."
The moral of the story, then, is keep your white hat on when approaching search marketing. Otherwise, Google's coming, and Google Hell's coming with him.
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