Did Google Use Their Privacy Policy Changes To Find and De-Index Private Blog Networks?
Recent changes to Google’s privacy policy were the talk of the town recently could they have anything to do with the de-indexing of many large sites recently?
Getting Google to notice your website is a lot of hard work at the best of times and a little like trying to get that enigmatic girl across the room to notice you. There are countless different techniques we can use and there’s loads of advice on which of these is the best, but ultimately if Google should change its mind on what it considers the ‘right way’ to promote your site then this is going to result in your effort being for naught.
This is something that blog networks now know all too well. The idea behind a blog network is simple that a number of blogs will agree to link to each other in order to share link juice and to help them to gain more visibility on Google. In rare cases some will even share advertisers across the blogs.
This idea is sound in theory, but in practice it fell foul to the machinations of many a black hat SEO strategist who saw this as an opportunity to quickly ramp up the PR of a new site – simply get involved in a blog network and you’ll suddenly have a ton of reciprocal links from other high-powered sites and Google will take notice.
But Then…
Until just recently when Google, with the wrath of a slighted God, smote those who would try to take such short cuts. Hundreds of sites were seemingly over-night ‘de-indexed’ from Google so that they lost all of their sticking power in Google.
And because so many of these sites were completely reliant on Google for all of their traffic, it is no surprise that several businesses folded as a result (not least the ones that were running the blog networks such as BuildMyRank). Largely this could be seen as a smart move by Google to get rid of more spammy sites, but there certainly were some innocent victims involved – and several sites using blog rolls (just listing their favorite blogs – which often would be reciprocal due to the friendly nature of the blogosphere) were similarly penalized.
How Did They Do It?
The question though is how did Google accomplish this? And more pressingly could it have anything to do with their new privacy policy? Google has released their new privacy policy which states that information will be shared across their services such as Google Analytics, AdSense, Google+, Search, Googlemail etc etc. The official line is that these policy changes are there to help provide a more seamless experience for users so that they might get recommendations that are more tailored to them etc but could Google also be using this privacy policy (which has been called into question by EU officials as breaching their privacy laws) in order to improve their algorithms?
While there’s no way to know for sure, it’s certainly something of a coincidence that Google chose now to strike all of these blog networks just as they had the legal means to use all that data. And to find and de-index each of the sites by hand would have been a hugely laborious job…
What This Means
As the dust settles there will of course be some very unhappy webmasters and bloggers without a home. In some cases it’s deserved, but in others it’s a genuine shame especially those people who received damaging links completely innocently. Sometimes it seems when Google acts out in such ways with so little warning, that they forget how many people are dependent on their service to make their livelihood.
The most important lesson to take from this other to be weary of the new privacy policy and to be very careful how you build your links is that it’s pure folly to be too reliant on Google for all your traffic. Make sure you have a clear picture of what your business would be and how it would carry on if Google were to de-index you tomorrow. Because it could happen.
This guest post was written by Jeet, of GetLinksPro.