OT: Google penalty? Ever heard of this?

[aron]

I am receiving these emails, but it seems fishy. They posts they link to are from the usual posters here. Are they trying to say that the posters have been hired to spam the forum?

Thanks!

----------------- EMAIL FOLLOWS

We have discovered that a company we hired to help promote our website mybinding.com have used a variety of questionable  techniques to secure links to our website. These links were placed purely for SEO purposes and as a result, we have received a manual penalty from Google.

It appears that there may be links like this that have been placed on your site.

The presence of these links is harmful to our site's good standing with search engines, and unfortunately, may pose a risk to your own website as well.

We would ask that you please remove or nofollow any links on your site that link to mybinding.com.

So far as we are aware, there are (or have been) links at these URLs:
http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=102705.msg911775;topicseen
http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=102705.msg911808;topicseen
http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=102705.20


We would greatly appreciate your help with resolving this problem.

You can also let us know once the links to mybinding.com have been removed either by return email, or using the link below.

If you need any more information from us, please email me and I will be happy to assist.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you and do appreciate your help.

[karbomusic]

I checked a couple of the posts and they were completely legitimate not to mention the same thread.  Looks like a few aren't happy about Google's practice of assuming some links are SEO/spam generated when they actually are not...

http://jeremypalmer.com/post/86123982870/google-is-breaking-the-internet

[midwayfair]

Forward it to Google customer service with "WTF is wrong with you?" as the only thing in the body.

[PRR]

> there are (or have been) links at these URLs:

These three links point to ONE thread.

J0K3RX says "kinda like this stuff..." and links to OfficeDepot's and MyBinding's transparency films.

This is NOT "spam". And certainly J0K3RX wasn't paid to post that (if he took money, he would have put MyBinding's link ahead of the OfficeDepot link). Anyway J0K3RX Jim seems to be a free-thinking independent guy. If he says a product is good, that's his honest endorsement.


MyBinding may have hired a link-sower(*) who over-did it.

Now they have been slapped and they want to remove "all" links to them. And don't bother to check-out the links to see if they are spammish or genuine organic endorsements.

You could point this out to MyBinding, or argue with them. But we see that *twice* their web-staff have not been attending to business carefully. _I_ would just ignore their request/complaint.

(*) Someone who posts links for pay. Typically a post from somebody with less than 3 posts which is not really on-topic and has a link to the company paying a few cents for links. I reported one here once; doesn't seem to happen a lot.

[Blitz Krieg]

Dear internetz,
google is not a charity! there will be consequences! think twice before hosting links on the google owned internet.

[gjcamann]

I think it could be legitimate compliant. Perhaps those links are associated with a pay-per click or click tracking service (or something like that) that is supposed to only be used with paid ads or particular services.

I would replace this link in the posts referenced above
http://www.mybinding.com/.sc/ms/dd/ee/44842/Quartet-Laser-Printer-Transparency-Film-VCG7060E?utm_medium=shoppingengine&utm_source=googlebase&utm_content=APO-VCG7060E&gclid=CLW0wKCikrcCFQne4AodwhAAig
with
http://www.mybinding.com/apollo-laser-printer-transparency-film-50pk.html
I bet that'll clear up the problem.

And once you do that, you should probably replace my own link above^^^^   

[aron]

Interesting. Thanks