[Ok so there are tons of threads out there with people complaining they’ve been sandboxed. In one of the threads, I mentioned how I have about a 90-95% success rate at climbing out of the so-called “sandbox” and have received many PMs on how to do this. I figured I should start a thread explaining some of my methods as a reference to help others. If this ends up being useful to you please hit the thanks button as I’m trying to build my reputation a bit more around here.]
You just described the typical result of the QDF freshness factor.
QDF is a temporary boost, NOT A PENALTY!
You seem to be reasoning that since QDF is temporary when it wears off you are now under a penalty. That doesn’t make sense to me unless you were oblivious to the effects of QDF. :confused:
Let’s review some verifiable facts and hopefully those who are willing to see the truth in those facts may draw different conclusions from the exact same events.
The Panda update was proceeded by a highly publicized story about JC Penny’s website ranking, based on obvious web spam, that was somewhat embarrassing to Google’s Search Quality Team. In my opinion, the Panda update seemed to be a response to that event.
Many people discussing that story on blogs and forums constantly referred to JC Penny’s website being “penalized” (bolded for clarity
). Due to those discussions, I can see how many folks came to accept the notion that the JC Penny website had been penalized, however on closer inspection it was quite clear that the JC Penny “website” was not penalized. It still ranked number one for many keywords, including some of the keywords that were promoted by that webspam.
As I did a postmortem analysis on the JC Penny website I found that the only thing that happened was that Google devalued the webspam backlinks that were hosted on other websites. No apparent penalty was found that directly applied to the JC Penny website.
This was not new or any different than what Google had already been doing all along. The only thing significantly different was the negative publicity for both Google and JC Penny. I believe that negative publicity prompted a tweak in the algorithm that came to be known as the Panda update.
The Panda update seemed to programmatically do what the webspam team was already doing after a human review. The result was a much quicker and more thorough discovery of webspam and it’s devaluation.
If you take a closer look at those websites that you claimed were “penalized”, you will discover that the website itself was not penalized. It appears that the only thing that happened was web spam was detected and devalued, and all web page rankings based on meritorious links were unaffected on those same websites.
Google uses signals of relevancy that are combined to create a total relevancy score. Your web pages are ranked in SERP based on that relevancy score. Some of those signals are used to weight the value of certain key relevancy signals. Most notably PageRank and Trust which is used to weigh the value of inbound anchortext relevancy scores.
If the Trust and/or PR of an external web page is reduced, this is not the same as a “penalty” on your website. It is simply prevented from effecting your web pages in any way. You might choose to refer to that as a penalty, but that really stretches the definition beyond anything within reason, in my opinion.
Stop creating webspam and start creating meritorious backlinks.
And if you really believe Xrumer blast tanked your site, just target your competitors with the exact same technique.
I hope you are not implying that the PR, or relevancy of anchor text, is the determinate factor of webspam. I don’t think that Google uses those as primary indicators of webspam.
It would be very difficult, indeed, to do a 20,000 link Xrumer blast that wasn’t massive web spamming. Are you claiming Google would see your Xrumer blast as valuable content that their users would find useful when visiting? Are you inferring your Xrumer blast is creating massive amounts of meritorious links and not just webspam?
The point I’m trying to make is that the process of link building is content creation. And yes, generally speaking, Xrumer blasts create massive amounts of webspam content. What makes a link meritorious isn’t the PR of the page where it is place nor the relevancy of the anchor text. What makes it meritorious is that content, that is created with it, is useful and adds value to the users.
The whole point of generating backlinks is to expose your web pages to a larger audience. Doing massive backlink campaigns will bring more exposure quickly, and naturally with that increased exposure you should expect more scrutiny by both humans and bots that are looking for and devaluing webspam.
One of the drawbacks of massive link building is that your webspam can get you labeled as a spammer and may cause your valuable content contributions to be discarded along with the spam. There are services, like Askimet, that maintain a database of abusers and when you earn a spot on their blacklist you will see a wholesale removal of your content contributions, even the meritorious ones. The efforts of many months of meritorious link building can be harmed by a single web spam blast.
