Has Google canned the Economist in Search Rankings? Blog Platform
The Google Page Rank figure of the Economist has been reduced from 8 down to 5 – a huge reduction. It may be down to a punishment from Google for the Economist displaying questionable “paid-for” text links as “classified adverts”. Here’s my take.
I should say that this article is not aiming to be exhaustive, as Google can adjust published page rank without affecting search engine rankings. My aim is to identify some issues for bloggers to watch.
What has happened?
The Economist has had its ranking value slugged by Google. It has gone down from a usual Page Rank of 8, down to a current Page Rank of 5 (The Page Rank is one factor that indicates how much importance Google attaches to a webpage). It seems that they have made a basic mistake of selling text links on the home page, which bear no real relation to the content of the page – and then by leaving simple “links” in place which will enhance the position of those client sites in Google.
Both practices are resolutely opposed by Google (summary), and have been for some time.
Here is a screen shot of the bottom of the Economist home page this lunchtime:
The list of advertisers is areas which are often found trying to gain advantage in the search engines by link buying. As Patrick Altoft puts it:
My only concern is that this is pretty much a “who’s who†of link buyers that Google could use to hand out penalties.
What they have done
The Economist is selling home page text-link adverts (terms and conditions as PDF – 200k)
Here is a screenshot segment of the source code from the page:
You get the point: multiple links to the same site, a mass of keywords, and they are simple links that pass pagerank.
Several Basic Mistakes
There seem to be several howlersmistakes:
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Text links being sold to advertising Clients not particularly relevant to the page. Bearing in mind that the practice has been under fire from Google for some considerable time, that was asking for trouble.
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Allowing those links to be visible to search engines. The recommendation is to add a “nofollow” attribute to the links, use Javascript, or to use a redirect.
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To do this with Credit Checking Services and “Cheap Loan” Finance companies seems – on top of the above – to be like running a red-flag up the flagpole for
the sake of it.
But what about Google text-link adverts?
You may say that Google sells Text-Link adverts? Why is that OK?
I can think of two reasons:
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Google aims to serve relevant text-link adverts – which is one of the reasons why I have just put them back on the blog, since we have a diverse range of content and range of audience. Also, Google ads are in Javascript, so are ignored by search engines.
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It’s Google’s search engine party and they can make anyone cry if they want to. That is simply the situation when we are living in a world with an effective search engine monopoly (outside China), and we must all just get used to it (at least until there is a regulatory action to rebalance the market).
And the consequences
I think that the page rank reduction is probably related to these adverts. I’d expect there to also be a loss of traffic in the next fortnight.
To see an example of a large company which suffered a reduced priority in the Google rankings, read the case study on GoCompare.com over at Hitwise UK. In this case their Google traffic reduced by almost 90% over the space of a fortnight:
Robin Goad did a further update to show how quickly the traffic (had not) recovered for GoCompare.com (in 11 weeks it had recovered only slightly).
The Economist is one of the most important twenty international English language news and comment sites on the Internet. If it can happen to them…
The Impact?
I have no idea yet – I don’t have the data to hand, but I have asked Robin Goad to take a look and publish the results in a few days.
Wrapping Up
The moral? Take great care when you implement adverts and text links: you are in bed with an elephant.
And I would not like to be in charge of the Economist marketing or website departments if this turns out to be a real problem.
Categories: All WW, Blog Platform, Columns, Internet / Technical, Media, News - Current Affairs
With a print circulation of 1.2 million a week, I don’t think The Economist is going to be losing much sleep over this.
I think you might be in for a surprise – but it depends what proportion of the traffic is from search engines (not data that I have).
What I am aure about is that if they do not address something that MAY be a problem, then they are slipping – one thing the Economist does well is attention to detail.
I’ll wait with interest to see what happens.
Matt
I have also made the “basic mistake” of selling text link ads on my blog. Sure enough, my PageRank went down — but my bank balance went up by £x.
I am increasingly of the belief that search engine traffic is next to useless. Sure, they make up a huge proportion of visits, but these are transitory — these people never come back. Sticky readers come through reputation and word-of-mouth. The Economist has a strong brand and a reputation for excellent journalism and analysis. That is all they need. Google can take a hike.
I wrote a post about this a few months ago.
doctorvees last blog post..In lieu of proper blogging, a meme
My view of Google is that it is mainly G that brings the “general public” – so I think it is important to those of us in the political niche who want to focus in particular on increasing participation. I reckon that my % of SE visits has never (except for occasional flourishes) been above about 30-35%. Currently G is around 10%.
>Sure, they make up a huge proportion of visits, but these are transitory — these people never come back. Sticky readers come through reputation and word-of-mouth.
Disagree there. I’d also see Goog as being key to getting new readers – that’s how most of them browse the net when looking. It’s our job to keep some when they arrive.
Next week on Blog Platform I’ll be covering how Google traffic has recovered after the hacking we had (viagra pages inserted via a vulnerability in Wordpress probably).
Loved your last comment:
>Found the link to the LibCon piece. Tore my hair out trying to navigate the site though — resorted to Google in the end.
It has *some* uses, then !
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The thing here is that, if Google and its algorithms are so smart, why does it need to “punish” a site in this way?
It seems clear that the page ranking algorithm is not working in the way it should. Why shouldn’t a page that is clearly relevant in the context of search terms used to find it get a high rank even if it has commercial links on it? Isn’t that just what Google does with its own ads anyway?
Google is, in effect, telling publishers (small or large) what they can and can’t do on their site. This is the behaviour of a monopolist and is akin to Microsoft telling consumers what media player they have to use – and we all know where that one ended up.
This is a case of the tail wagging the dog and the sooner we all wised up to it the better.
Update 1 July 2008:
The Economist is back to PR8, and in the meantime it has added “nofollow” to the link adverts, and the more controversial ones are no longer there.
[...] to research what happened when other publications tried the same approach. The Irish Independent, the Economist and The Times are among publications whose PageRank has been penalised by [...]