Google Busts Yet Another Link Network: Anglo Rank

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, just confirmed on Twitter that Google has targeted another “private link network” – this one is named Anglo Rank.

Matt’s tweet was pretty direct, he wrote:

“There are absolutely NO footprints linking the websites together” Oh, Anglo Rank.

That is a quote directly from Anglo Rank’s marketing material, and a dig from Cutts suggesting that indeed, Google was able to spot sites in the network.

In response, Search Engine Land’s editor-in-chief Matt McGee suggested on Twitter that those in the network were likely to find that it was “torched.” Cutts responded by saying “messages can take a few days to show up in [Google Webmaster Tools], so timing of when to post can be tricky to predict.”

In other words — yes, Cutts confirmed that Anglo Rank was penalized, and that those involved with it were getting penalty notifications, and since those were finally starting to appear in Google Webmaster Tools, Cutts felt it was OK to finally go more public with a tweet.

Matt Cutts Talks Content Stitching In New Video

Google has a new Webmaster Help video out about content that takes text from other sources. Specifically, Matt Cutts responds to this question:

Hi Matt, can a site still do well in Google if I copy only a small portion of content from different websites and create my own article by combining it all, considering I will mention the source of that content (by giving their URLs in the article)?

“Yahoo especially used to really hate this particular technique,” says Cutts. “They called it ‘stitching’. If it was like two or three sentences from one article, and two or three sentences from another article, and two or three sentences from another article, they really considered that spam. If all you’re doing is just taking quotes from everybody else, that’s probably not a lot of added value. So I would really ask yourself: are you doing this automatically? Why are you doing this? Why? People don’t just like to watch a clip show on TV. They like to see original content.”