Thread: Email Reputation Causes Penalties in Google Search Results

A number of Web sites hit with falling search rankings in April had several things in common. These sites publish original articles, frequently in the 500+ word range, which is supposed to be a quality benchmark in the way Google values content. They are authored by writers generally considered to be among the leading experts in their field. And all of these Web sites publish email newsletters. I’m part of this group and while it sounds arrogant for me to consider myself an expert, there are a handful of topics I know more about than most other people.
When my traffic at JakeLudington.com suddenly dropped in early April, I thought I’d made some kind of change that was resulting in a technology failure. I was wrong. Everything appeared to load as it should. So why the sudden drop? I called around to a handful of friends and discovered I was not alone. Early April was the second round of Panda algorithm changes. With some additional digging, I got a tip from someone at Google who indicated Google was penalizing JakeLudington.com with some new measurements that penalize email behaviors for domains. In talking with a number of other online publishers who were also hit with a stiff penalty, including LockerGnome, it appears that one common theme is that we all have email newsletters.

Email Reputation Causes Penalties in Google Search Results Web Developers

Please read the entire article before responding.

Do you think it is fair that email reputation causes penalties in some search engines search results?

I can see how it can be seen as one of the quality indicators so, fair or not (what does that even mean?), I can understand why Google with their current mindset would do this.

Originally Posted by memenode

I can see how it can be seen as one of the quality indicators so, fair or not (what does that even mean?), I can understand why Google with their current mindset would do this.

It is just the evidences that free tools from Google are double edged sword and the reason that I don't use them.

It may depend upon how many people are hitting the Spam button when they receive the newsletters in a GMail account. I sign up for a lot of newsletters and they all go to a GMail account. While most site owners send a periodic newsletter containing what they say they will send, others do border on spam because I get deluged with advertisements, scammy misrepresented promotions and things that I didn't expect. The worst ones are the newsletters who do not take your e-mail off of their list when you request it.

Lockergnome is mentioned in the article. Up until 5 or 6 years ago that newsletter contained useful information. For the past several years they went on a binge to build content and started sending out a lot of garbage. The Lockergnome web site itself contains most of the garbage articles, so it may in reality be the web sites themselves that are the problem and not the newsletters. The author of the article assumes that his articles are not part of the problem, but that might not be the case. I checked his web site and the articles look okay, so my jury is still out on this one.

One of the things that I noticed with Panda is that sites with rambling blog postings and lots of unrelated content appear to have been hit. Keep your content unique and focused on a theme and you may never see a problem. The traffic is up considerably on my blogs that focus on a topic.

The comments are interesting. According to Matt Cutts, the headline is not correct.

Another thing; what if you use your gmail account to forward certain mail to another account. Or, when using an email client leave the mail in your gmail account as unread with certain settings. You might still read the mail or even click links in it without 'google knowing' it.

It doesn't sound like a sensible to do but if true, then it means the algo or whatever they use is far from flawless.