Google Warns German Webmasters That Paid Links Violate Google’s Guidelines

Google head of search spam Matt Cutts postedon Twitter this morning another stern warning to German webmasters about a link penalty looming for them.

Matt Cutts tweeted:

A reminder (in German) that paid links that pass PageRank violate our guidelines: http://goo.gl/sHDdlC

The blog post is written in German on the German Webmaster blog, which basically says Google reserves the right to issue penalties for unnatural links. It then goes through the process of explaining the types of unnatural links and how to submit a reconsideration request if you were hit.

Google Is Not Broken

In spite of what many think, Google is not broken. But wait, naysayers will say, Look at this search result, it stinks! This spammer is succeeding in ranking high, they emerged from nowhere and are now in the top three results!

It’s true — there are many such examples that you can point to. Making sense of this landscape can be quite confusing, but that’s what I will attempt to do in today’s post.

Firstly, there are two basic reasons why Google can be quite slow to address some of the problems you might find.

1. They Can Afford To Be Thoughtful And Patient

Why, you ask? They have dominant market share. Here is the December 2013 market share data from comScore:

comScore notes that “‘Explicit Core Search’ excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.” In my experience, the practical impact of adjusting for this is that the Google search market share is a bit higher. Most sites I look at show a larger percentage of their organic search coming from Google than 67%.