First it was the New Yorks Time’s unmasking of JC Penney’s blatant link buying. Now Overstock.com, a dotcom survivor started in 1999, has also fallen afoul of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for excessive links building.
Overnight, the Wall Street Journal published the grim results of Google’s punishment on Overstock’s attempt to game the system.
The WSJ reported: “Overstock’s pages had recently ranked near the top of results for dozens of common searches, including “vacuum cleaners” and “laptop computers.” But links to Overstock on Tuesday dropped to the fifth or sixth pages of Google results for many of those categories, greatly reducing the chances that a user would click on its links.”
So where did Overstock.com go wrong? Well according to a spokesperson from Overstock, their practice of encouraging college and university websites to link back to Overstock so that all their students could receive a 10% discount, likely put them in penalty box.
A quick search on Opensiteexplorer.com, a tool from SEOmoz for checking a website’s back links clearly shows the high number of educational websites linking to Overstock’s vacuum cleaners page. In addition, a quick glance at the anchor text pointing to the same page shows a high usage of “vacuum,” “vacuums” and “vacuum cleaners” over the more common brand related term such as Overstock.
For someone trained in SEO, seeing a high number of links coming from similar domains and using the same or similar anchor text is often a clear sign of over optimisation. Obviously, Google felt the same way and believed that intervention was needed.
Here’s an example from one of the Universities who took up the offer.
So if you’re not already convinced of Google’s intentions to stomp out excessive linking building after JC Penney’s recent woes, then this latest public lashing of Overstock.com should be a cause of concern, especially if you’ve been using similar tactics.
With the high levels of link buying that we’ve seen here in Australia and abroad I expect to see a few more public outings of other well known brands in the coming weeks. Whether it will help to turn the tide against those who go too far is yet to be seen.