Even Google is Not Immune to Google Penalties
If you think Google penalties for certain activities seem unfair, what would say if the search engine penalized itself for those same activities? I know what you're thinking: wait, what? It's true and it should be a lesson to you that Google will not tolerate paid links, period.
Barry Schwartz broke the story over at Search Engine Land. You may recall that Google has been actively campaigning against sites that use paid links since at least late 2007, enacting a number of penalties against them. The sites selling links got hit first with a PageRank penalty, followed by sites that apparently bought a lot of paid links.
So when well-known Google employee Matt Cutts said on Twitter that Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while, readers naturally wondered whether this was a paid link penalty to which Cutts replied yes. What exactly is going on here? How and why did one part of Google break the company's official policies?
The pay-per-post approach is not held in the same disdain in Japan as it is in the US, so it's not too surprising that Google Japan purchased blog posts to promote their web site. Over there, Yahoo has a tremendous advantage over Google; the venerable search engine holds a little more than 50 percent of the search market, with Google a determined but trailing second at 39 percent.
Here's the really interesting point: this isn't the first time Google has penalized itself for breaking its own policies. Back in 2005, some of its help pages turned out to be cloaking content, showing human visitors one thing and Google's bot something else. So, believe it or not, when someone noticed this, those pages were removed from Google's index, and the team responsible for them had to clean them up and file a reinclusion request, just like everyone else.
Bottom line: if Google isn't going to exclude itself from its own punishments, it certainly isn't going to exclude your site, no matter how important you think you are. Danny Sullivan seems to think that, while large and important sites might only get a slap on the wrist, because doing otherwise would hurt the relevance of Google's results, Smaller sites that won't be noticed if they go missing indeed might find themselves missing. So you're better off playing it safe. Good luck!
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