Brands which attempt to manoeuvre up Google’s search rankings by paying online publishers to post links about them have been warned their actions could result in being kicked off the hallowed ‘first page’.
The move follows a row between Google and Interflora, which saw the florist fall off the first page during its busiest time of the year, Valentine’s week.
The company was accused of using underhand tactics to massage the figures and get a false ranking in free search.
Reports claim that Interflora placed more than 150 advertorials on regional news sites across the UK in the days and weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, in a move designed to pass Google’s so-called PageRank listings.
PageRank, named after Google founder Larry Page, is a tool which assigns a numerical weighting to each link, thereby potentially moving it up the rankings.
Now Google head of search spam Matt Cutts has issued the warning in a blog post. He wrote: “Please be wary if someone approaches you and wants to pay you for links or ‘advertorial’ pages on your site that pass PageRank.
“Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action on such violations. The consequences for a link-selling site start with losing trust in Google’s search results, as well as reduction of the site’s visible PageRank in the Google Toolbar. The consequences can also include lower rankings for that site in Google’s search results.”
