Postcard from Bishkek

I was surprised the other day to receive an email from a firm based in the UK offering professional translation services … it said:

We had a message from Google about unnatural links pointing to our site, and we are currently in the process of cleaning our link profile. We believe the link from your site may be potentially harming our website rankings as we believe it appears unnatural. You may have been requested to put it there by our old SEO company.

Our website domain is www.xxx.xx.xx

As we will be sending Google a list of web addresses we believe to be adversely affecting our site, I wanted to give you the opportunity to remove our link so I can remove you from our list. I don’t want Google to look at your site negatively because it was on our list, so I wanted to give you a chance to remove the link.

Please let me know when you have done it so I can remove you from the list.

Many thanks for your time, it’s really appreciated.

It certainly created in me “a sequence of emotions” which went something like: “panic, fear, confusion, relief, irritation, then back to confusion.”

• “What on earth,” I thought to myself, “is an ‘unnatural link’”?
• “Who on earth are xxx.xx.xx? – I don’t remember linking to their site?”
• What’s in this implied threat of submitting a list to Google which might cause them “to look at my site negatively”?

In answer to the first question, apparently the phrase “unnatural links” refers to:

artificial links mainly intended to manipulate a page’s ranking. These can include purchased links or links created by scrapers and spammers that attach themselves to your site under the radar and potentially link your site to another in a bad neighborhood of the internet.” … whatever “scrapers” and “bad neighborhood of the internet” means.

And also, For the record, a “scraper” is “a spam website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping. The purpose of creating such a site can be to collect advertising revenue or to manipulate search engine rankings by linking to other sites to improve their search engine ranking.”

This surprised me somewhat because I don’t include links, and I have certainly never been paid to provide a link – even though I have received some such offers by email.  I tend to include a link either to show my source or to a site where there is a lot of additional information (and I want to save myself a lot of typing).

 

So, having done a quick Google search and discovered this … I turned my attention to the second question.  As I said, I didn’t remember creating any link to this site so I had to go looking through all 1500 or so posts to see if I could find it.  Fortunately my blogging software found it fairly quickly.

The offending link was in a postcard from 2011 about making toasts at a dinner party, or other similar event.  It opened with a reference to The Loyal Toast and went on to consider other traditional forms.  I went onto to consider ways of saying “Cheers!” in different languages and provided links to five websites which had lists of such phrases – the ‘offending’ link being one of them.

Obviously, at the time, I thought this was appropriate … and I still do.  So, why is it considered “unnatural”.  It seems to me that the accusation comes from someone (at Google or the translation service) who hasn’t looked at the link in context.

Still, when I clicked on the link in the postcard … it didn’t work but took me to the front page of the translation service’s website – maybe the page I was referring to has since been removed … so that made the decision about how to react to the request easier … I deleted the link … after all, it was superfluous as it no loner did what I had intended it to do.

 

Turning to the third question … I admit that spammers and scrapers are an annoying nuisance … but is this the right way to deal with them?

More or less everyday ianbek receives between 20 and 30 comments on posts … many with links back to other sites that have little or nothing to do with the content of the post – and they get dumped. The system I use is set up so that I have to approve comments before they get published and so I look at all of them in turn and just occasionally I find one that is relevant and so is published – but most of them are simply deleted as SPAM.

Occasionally, however, there is something in the comment and I find a useful link to another site, which I think might be interesting to visitors to ianbek … so it gets approved and posted.  Everything else is ignored or trashed.  It takes time and effort but it seems to “go with the territory” … it’s all “part and parcel” of running a ‘blog’.

Actually, it is actually quite pleasant to get receive a link back from someone who has found a postcard interesting and wants to share it with others.

The fact that it is supposed to help my page ranking in Search Engines such as Google is a bonus … but I suspect it the effect it has in my particular case is marginal. I do appreciate, however, that for some people it is “big business” … HOWEVER … It seems odd for sites, (such as that of the translation service) to be penalized – or even be “threatened” of being penalized – by Google based on the “quality” of individual links … after all, owners of websites have virtually no control over who links back to them.

By all means, search out the “scrapers” and “spammers” and do what is possible to limit their effect … but the efforts should surely be to limit their activities rather than this “blunderbuss” approach.

To add insult to injury, the daily “alerts” that I receive from Google – based on terms such as Kyrgyzstan or Tourism will still, sometimes, include links to such sites.

 

 

Tags: ianbek, internet