Is Google Penalizing Sites for Profile Behavior?

I think it’s true, Google is a profiler. Your back link profile, and timing of it all.

• It appears to me that Google is now Penalizing sites based on Back Links showing up in unnatural “Batches”.
• It seems logical that Google is grading your entire Back Link profile based on new logic that includes when and how often Links are acquired, not only the source of those back links.

If your web sites back link Profile looks like this: with the line representing a week or a month interval with very little new back links in between those intervals, you look pretty unnatural don’t you?

_____30 links__________27 Link___________30 Links ___________27 links

Let’s say you’re Google. You really dislike any attempt to manipulate your algorithm.  So you want to build in a bunch of signals that will tell you when a site is trying to unnaturally manipulate its rankings in your search results.

So you bring together your very talented spam group, and some of the best engineers in the world and come up with what you would consider sure fire signs and signals that a web site is trying to game the system, and you  make some pretty big (and good) changes to how you rank sites.  Many of you know these changes as “Panda”, and “Penguin” up dates.  You can search either to find an abundance of SEO information about this. It rocked some of the SEO world.

But something that hasn’t been discussed recently showed up in a blog post at http://blumenthals.com/blog/ and written by one of the Internets best “local SEO’ guys, Mike Blumenthal.

It relates, in this instance to “Local SEO” and how Google perceives reviews posted in bunches. Basically there have been all sorts of problems recently where a business has several clients’ review them and it never shows up on their Google Places Listing. The Blog I linked to above, and response from Google explains that when they see a bunch of reviews come in at once, or over a short period of time, it can flag them as spam reviews because they assume the business has sent out a request for those reviews. Google wants reviews to be a natural occurrence. So reviews are good, requesting reviews are bad, and that’s how they assume you have requested reviews from your customers. And that is (in my opinion) exactly how Google feels about back links to a web site.

Now, those of us how have been in Internet Marketing and Web Promotion for long time understand that if you just throw 1000 links at a page over a short period of time, that you may get a nice ranking for a day or week, but the “bounce” effect will pull that ranking down pretty fast,  nothing new there,  but what does seem new to me is not only will throwing a bunch of links at one time hurt your rankings, but building links in “batches” may hurt your rankings as well. Isn’t that the same premise as getting a bunch of reviews at once… it’s just not natural.

Now clearly this will depend on the type of back links.  It is natural, one would assume that if your blog gets picked up by a national site, or distributed by them to their national audience, that you will get a “Batch” of back links. Seems natural right?  Happens to our site now and then, and we never see much happen in the negative way. Those back links all come from Internet Marketing type sites, and all quote the same blog or information.

But….. (drum Roll)….If those “batches” of back links are from less than high quality sites, (like free directories), or low value blog’s, or low value blog comments, or completely unrelated sites, or social bookmarks, I would assume Goggle may ignore them, or actually penalize your site rankings.  Yes, I think they are now penalizing for Profile Behavior, as much as for the Back Links to your site.

And it seems to me that a profile penalty is about the hardest predicament to overcome. It’s kind of like having to walk around town with a convicted felon sticker on your head and Google is the Police.

So it all goes back to doing web visibility and  PR as if Google Didn’t exist. In many ways the last year of changes to how Google ranks sites have changed how an SEO or a web master should view rankings forever. If your SEO is using 2011 tactics, you may be heading in the wrong direction.