Google Breaks Its Own Golden Rule

Google Bowling

I’ve been building new affiliate websites to diversify away from the Internet Marketing niche for the last few years.

In the past, getting Google to index and rank a new site wasn’t difficult. In fact, my last two IM products were to do with using datafeed content (going back several years!) and, more recently, using the power of a “future niche” to plant your website at the top of Google and stay there.

But, I’ve noticed that Google is using its penalty filters more strictly now than it used to. It seems that if you build a few “suspicious” links, with optimised anchor text, you’ll get slapped with a penalty filter before you can blink.

What interesting is that this activity breaks one of the fundamental rules of Google… a website owner is NOT responsible for links pointing to their website. The reason for this Golden Rule is simple… if it didn’t exist, the world of Black Hat SEO would spend their time and energy building BAD links to competitors to push them out of the search engine results pages (known as Google Bowling).

OK, so how can Google justify breaking its own Golden Rule? Well, it seems that the penalty is only applied to brand new sites… those whose age is measured in months rather than years. And here’s the super-smart bit… Google’s algorithm mostly preventsnew sites ranking for competitive phrases… so there won’t be much “Google Bowling” going on because, by definition, trying to knock a competitor out of the rankings only makes sense if they have a valuable number one ranking.

It’s genius. You let webmasters build new websites and if they do anything suspicious in the first year (my guess for how long probation lasts), they’re on the “naughty step”. You give a free pass to any website older than a year to prevent Google bowling. You apply penalties algorithmically to avoid any manual overheads.

My guess is that you can avoid the 12-month probation by getting a link or two from older sites who have some authority and can “vouch” for your new website. If you can’t get those links, be prepared for a long wait before you can do any “real” link building.