What happened?
On the 20th February 2013 Interflora was wiped off the face of the Internet for hundreds of popular sector search terms like ‘flowers’ , ‘florist’ and ‘flower delivery ‘. Prior to this, the firm had generally been ranking in first place for most of these terms. But following the Google penalty, didn’t even appear to rank for its own brand name (see below)
So what was the actual penalty Interflora received?
It’s important to remember a website can experience two kinds of penalties – algorithmic penalties and manual penalties.
- An algorithmic penalty is automatically triggered if the algorithm detects things like content spam, keyword stuffing, over-optimised anchor text, cloaking and so on. If a website suffers this type of penalty, it will exist until the element that triggered it is removed.
- A manual penalty is applied after a degree of manual investigation by Google. It could be triggered if a report is submitted about the site and can lead to de-indexing, loss of rankings on specific keywords or even the how block of links or linking types are valued. Manual penalties stay fixed for a period of time – dependent on the severity of the crime.
Interflora was given a substantial manual penalty, losing visibility of its brand term, as well as a high volume of generic keywords where it previously ranked at position one. This resulted in a massive drop in natural search visibility reported in the tool Search Metrics (the blue line dropping off a cliff). The only short term way to recover this traffic is through paid search – which could have been particularly costly had the company not recovered in time for Mother’s Day.
Why did this happen?
There are several reasons why Interflora was penalised. Their overly aggressive SEO approach was designed to take maximum market share during valentine’s season, but the campaign went against many of Google’s best practice SEO rules. Some of these issues included:
- Heavily and unnaturally up-weighted link building in the run up to Valentine’s Day, targeting exact-match anchor text and 300 word articles stuffed with up to seven or eight links.
- The same content and copy across multiple online spaces – creating duplicate content issues.
- Obvious networks of advertorial links from newspaper websites using the same IP addresses, with over 150 advertorials built in just a couple of days. Several of these sites have also been penalized as a result.
- Using its own, poorly disguised link network of sites to put out even more content.
- A large number of pages with thin content targeting ‘location+flowers’. Google’s index of the site shows over 23,000 of these pages, with most pointed at search terms with little or no traffic, and hence little benefit to the user.
- The explicit exchange of free flowers for links in its blog outreach program (though there’s debate about the extent that this would cause a penalty given the difficulty of tracing this).
- Publicity generated by the above when bloggers were contacted in a panic and asked to remove the links. Had Interflora not done this, the approach would have been fine.
The implications for the industry
Google has recently reminded webmasters publicly on their blog on the use of paid for advertorial links and it’s likely this was the most explicit trigger in the Interflora case. However, the greatest fallout from the penalty has been how advertorials are used as a tool for link building – something which can has been evidenced in a number of ways.
- Google has warned webmasters about the consequences of selling advertorial pages with embedded links and how this may impact rankings in a recent blog.
- A number of regional news sites in the UK have now seen significant drops in PageRank
- Many sites are moving to ‘no follow’ links in their paid content, even changing some of their historic links.
How did Interflora respond?
Following the penalty, Interflora immediately started to remove 150 paid advertorial links built in the run up to Valentine’s Day. It’s likely the SEO team working on Interflora used the Google Disavow tool to tell Google which links they want to be ignored – which the search engine will no doubt take as a strong ‘recommendation’ in its next crawl.
What’s interesting is, it should take weeks if not months for Google to re-crawl these pages and discount them. In addition, Interfora had hundreds of links from low quality web-pages that would not be re-crawled regularly, so it’s safe to say the re-crawl process was sped up by Google manually. It’s also possible Interflora had already disavowed its lower quality links following the Google Penguin update last year. This combination of disavowing links and removing paid-for advertorials has put Interflora back where it was, though its link profile is still far from perfect.
MEC Opinion: This public penalty shows the value of understanding Google and the levers to pull to drive SEO performance – as well as how not to pull them. At MEC we believe all content should be beneficial to users and subsequently search engines. Our strategy has always been based on a varied link building campaign focusing on different link types to drive performance. In light of the Interflora case, advertising agencies and in-house marketing teams will need to look at more creative ways of content marketing which, done correctly, will ensure the links come.