It’s been a busy year already with big brands getting hit by Google penalties. First came Rap Genius, slammed so hard that you couldn’t find it for its own name. Then came Expedia’s suspected penalty that may have hurt its traffic. But these are also a familiar tune. Big brand violates Google’s rules, gets in trouble but ultimately returns to Google’s good graces with what may seem a virtual wrist-slap.
Below, in reverse chronological order, is a list of major brands that have been hit by Google penalties over the years for various reasons. Some violations weren’t even intentional.
10) Rap Genius & Links For Tweets
Rap Genius invited bloggers to add links to its lyrics content, in exchange for Rap Genius then tweeting the posts from those bloggers. After this exchange came to light on Christmas Eve 2013, the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts said
Google would investigate Rap Genius.
- When: December 2013
- Violation: Unnatural links
- Penalty: Much of entire site degraded from ranking in the first page of results at Google; didn’t rank for its own name
- Penalty Period: 10 days
9) Mozilla & UGC Spam
That’s right, Mozilla — which makes the popular open source Firefox browser — has been penalized by Google. But unlike with Rap Genius, it was an extremely specific situation — one single page of user-generated content that was considered too spammy to include.
- When: April 2013
- Violation: UGC spam
- Penalty: Single page apparently degraded in rankings
- Penalty Period: N/A, because the page was removed
8) BBC & Mysterious “Unnatural Links”
Google penalized the respected British Broadcasting Corporation? It sure did. Similar to Mozilla, the penalty involved a single page, this time one deemed to have “unnatural links” pointing at it.
- When: March 2013
- Violation: Unnatural links
- Penalty: Single page apparently degraded in rankings
- Penalty Period: Unknown
7) Interflora & Advertorial Links?
- When: February 2013
- Violation: Probably paid links in advertorials and perhaps elsewhere
- Penalty: Much of entire site degraded from ranking in the first page of results at Google; didn’t rank for own name
- Penalty Period: 11 days
6) Overstock: Discounts For Links
Overstock hit trouble with Google after a competitor found that it was offering discounts to schools in exchange for links back to the Overstock website. The links lead to particular products, with very specific
anchor text that helped Overstock rank well for terms like “vacuum cleaners” and “gift baskets.” The Wall Street Journal
profiled Overstock being hit by the penalty, probably tipped by the same competitor that reported Overstock to Google.
Overstock was so happy to have its penalty lifted two months later that it issued a press
release about the news. Overstock said the impact might hit revenues by 5% and
filed a statement for investors with the SEC in the weeks after it hit. It also blamed the penalty for “adversely” impacting revenue for the first and second quarter of 2011, in its annual
filing.
- When: February 2011
- Violation: Paid links, in the form of offering discounts for linking back to the site
- Penalty: Much of entire site degraded from ranking in the first page of results at Google; probably kept ranking for own name
- Penalty Period: 2 months
5) JC Penney & Paid Links
- When: February 2011
- Violation: Paid links
- Penalty: Many pages degraded from ranking in the first page of Google’s results
- Penalty Period: 90 days
4) Washington Post & Selling Links
In October 2007, Google made a major change in saying that
if sites sold links to others, for the purposes of helping Google rankings, the sellers themselves might be hit with a penalty. Soon after, a number of sites were penalized, including Forbes, Engadget and what will be the poster-child for this action, the Washington Post.
Unlike examples above, these sites generally didn’t lose rankings in Google, though Google reserved the right to do that. IE, you could still find their home pages and much of their content in Google searches.
- When: October 2007
- Violation: Selling links
- Penalty: PageRank value dropped from PR7 to PR5
- Penalty Period: Uncertain when it was restored; probably within months. Currently PR8
3) BMW & Cloaking
Cloaking is a technique where a site might show one thing to a search engine’s automated “crawlers” that gather up pages and something else to human visitors. Google doesn’t like cloaking and considers it a punishable offense. And cloaking lead to one of the earliest penalties against a major brand, when German site of BMW was hit for it.
Google removed the entire site.
It was big news, at the time. It also underscored what continues to be a problem for Google. When it happened, I
wrote that Google would have to quickly have to restore the site because searchers expected to find it. Three days later,
BMW was back in.
- When: February 2006
- Violation: Cloaking
- Penalty: Site removed
- Penalty Period: 3 days
2) WordPress & Doorway Spam
Wait, the program beloved by so many bloggers, which we even use here at Marketing Land — WordPress — was penalized by Google for spam? Yep.
Way back when WordPress was young, it once played host to pages for a third-party company that was after higher rankings. Those rankings were easier to obtain if the articles were within the popular WordPress site itself. The pages also had hidden links to other content.
Andy Baio
spotted what was going on, and chaos and debate quickly followed. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg
had just gone on vacation to Italy, so it was hard for him to respond to the reaction. But fairly quickly, he
said it was a badly implemented experiment in advertising and apologized.
- When: March 2005
- Violation: Doorway Pages
- Penalty: Site’s home page didn’t rank for its name; PageRank was reduced from PR8 to nothing; other “inside” pages were OK
- Penalty Period: 2 days
1) SearchKing, Selling Links & The First Amendment
OK, you might argue that SearchKing isn’t a big brand like the others on the list above, so where’s the list of 10 you were promised? Relax, the bonus below has you covered. But
SearchKing is one of the earliest and most famous penalties that led to a court case supporting Google’s right to largely do what it wants with its search results.
SearchKing — a small search engine at the time — backed the “PR Ad Network,” a way for people to buy and sell links in hopes of gaining better rankings on Google. Google didn’t like that and in September 2002
dropped SearchKing’s PageRank score from PR8 to PR4. In turn, that led SearchKing to sue Google over the decrease in October 2002.
The following year, a judge
ruled that Google’s listings — including whether it wants to give a site a good PageRank score or not — were Google’s opinions and thus
protected from government interference under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. About four years later — and after SearchKing had abandoned the link-selling model — it regained its PageRank score, actually going up to PR7
- When: September 2002
- Violation: Selling links
- Penalty: Site’s home page didn’t rank for its name; PageRank was reduced from PR8 to nothing; other “inside” pages were OK
- Penalty Period: 3 years, 7 months
Bonus: Google Penalizes Itself, Over & Over Again
There are plenty of sites that intentionally spam Google, and this can include some big brands. But there are also sites that get into trouble without meaning to do harm. They might do things without any intention to go against Google’s rules and yet end up on the wrong side of the Google law.
There’s no better illustration of this than Google itself, which has taken action against itself five times for violations ranging from buying links to cloaking. For more about that, we invite you to read the companion article to this that we have on our Search Engine Land site:
What About Expedia?
Why isn’t Expedia on the list above? That’s because it’s not a confirmed penalty. Interflora was never officially confirmed, either. But unlike with Expedia, the Interflora home page disappearing from Google for so long was effectively a confirmation that it had been hit by severe penalty.
So a penalty? Maybe. Or maybe Google did a clean-up action against suspected paid links that, when removed from the ranking equation, meant Expedia no longer did well for some terms.
When asked on an earnings call this month about any penalty, Expedia’s CEO dodged, not addressing the question directly but instead
saying that year-over-year traffic from Google — which he called a “big partner” — continues to increase.
What About Everyone Else? An Open Letter To Come….
How about suspicions that the major UK bank of Halifax
has been hit by a penalty? Or several other brands suspected to be hit by penalties, rumors that have been circulating in the past week or so in various venues.
We’ll have more to say about that on our
Search Engine Land sibling-site tomorrow. The short story is that it’s often difficult to confirm if someone’s officially been hit by a penalty or not. Since Google almost never says, it’s down to making educated guesses.
A disappearing home page is often a good sign, but there can still be other reasons for that. A chart showing that a site plunged in estimated search visibility could be indicative of a penalty, but there could also be other reasons, too.
It’s also concerning when the tips often come from competitors with their own motives for outing some companies. Add to this the fact if we wrote about all the sites Google penalizes, or is suspected to have penalized, that’s all we’d write about.
Going forward, we’ll be looking to write about sites that have been hit by penalties when there’s something exceptionally notable about particular situations, either new lessons beyond the ones already learned by the examples above, or new twists that really are unique.
Again, tune-in tomorrow on Search Engine Land for more about this. We’ll also postscript a follow-up to our story from here. Meanwhile, don’t forgot our companion story there:
One of Google’s big sins is when people buy links in hopes they’ll generate better Google rankings. However, 
When Google acquired financial comparison service Beat That Quote, it also acquired a problem. SEOs and places 
Google found itself violating its own rules against “
Google got in trouble with itself when Google Japan admitted to buying links to help promote a Google widget. When the news emerged, 
Similar to Rap Genius,
A