Matt Cutts: Google's severity penalty for repeat offenders

The Interflora case In a recent Webmaster Help video, the head of the Google Webspam team, Matt Cutts, talks about the sites penalised for having spammed links and how it is possible to quickly recover lost positioning. The occasion is a question on the Interflora case. For those who do not remember, the British site of the company bought numerous links considered as spam in February.

Google's penalties made its positioning fall, but in only 11 days Interflora managed to recover thanks to the Mountain View giant. How? Stricter punishments for repeat offenders Cutts does not elaborate the details of the story. However, it reveals something very interesting: occasionally violating Google's guidelines may result in relatively light penalties, but sites that violate them repeatedly must expect ever-increasing punishments. "Google considers the purchase and sale of links that pass PageRank as a violation of our guidelines. And if we see that this happening repeatedly, then the actions we take become increasingly severe,"says Cutts. Recover ranking quickly If you receive a warning from Google for spam, therefore, it is better not to defy fate and resort to "cleaner" SEO techniques to prevent your placement from being damaged further. In this case it is good to check your backlink profile and reject the offending links.

According to Cutts, a good request for reconsideration should not skimp on rejected links: "Typically what we see in a reconsideration request is that people try to prune a few links. A good reconsideration request often eliminates many domains that have bad links." In the past Cutts had expressed the same concept eloquently, saying that the rejection of links should be used as a machete and not as a scalpel. In extreme cases, where the domain is good but bad management has it toxic in terms of spam, it may be advisable to make a clean sweep of the links of the last months or years. Actions of this kind can be positively evaluated by Google and favour the success of a reconsideration request. Is this what happened in the Interflora case? Cutts does not explicitly say so, but perhaps you can glean this by reading between the lines. In any case it is better to adopt a responsible management of your SEO strategy and limit spam before being forced to resort to extreme remedies.