Stomper Update: Google’s New “Link Trap” (Warning)
If you are buying links or aggressively collecting links from link partners, please read this Stomper Update for an important warning.
Recently, Google has been knocking (often highly ranked) pages out of the top 1,000 for certain keywords. One minute you’re on the first page, and the next day, you’re gone.
Ironically, the problem appears to be having too many of the wrong kind of links. I want to share these observations with you and tell you how to avoid this “Link Trap” disaster.
[**Note: To receive these Updates by email, please join the list to the left.**]
Google’s New “Link Trap”
Background: How I discovered this new pitfall…
As many of you know, Andy and I have been conducting an Apprentice Program for the last several months. It’s been a great experience working one on one with our apprentices and their web sites.
We’ve been working with students on real world projects, kind of like Donald Trump except no one gets fired! 
On the contrary, many of the Apprentices have already seen tremendous improvement in their search engine rankings and their online income is way up.
It’s been very gratifying to be a small part of helping people work toward what they want
Posted by
You forgot the ‘l’ in the Email link.
Should have been stomer-update-googles-new-link-trap-warning.html
In the email its a “.htm” so everyone would be getting a 404 error, unless you quickly do a 302 from the “.htm” page
The “l” actually was there, it was just on the next line in the email, all by itself. That’s why you send test messages to yourself to check stuff lke that.
Hello Brad
I just read your latest on the Google link trap. My site was 3rd place in Google 3 weeks ago and now it is gone. I have not purchased any links, they are all ones I have collected by hand. What do you think?
Frank
Useful info, Brad, thanks.
Is there any info on whether lowering the number of links containing the main keyword has an adverse effect on Yahoo or MSN?
IOW, if we change in an attempt to improve ranking with G, do we then lose ranking in the other two?
Rob
Thank you Brad, this is totally good information to be aware of, thank you for sharing this, I appreciate it.
Bruno
Live Free, Be Life
Hello Brad!
Thanks for the heads up!
You nailed it!
Your exact email info is exactly what happened to me!
Just awful, I got knocked off week of Thanksgiving by GOOGLE !!! (bitter pill)
Can’t wait till reveiw of SEO Elite!
Thanks
ralph
Hello Brad!
Thanks for the heads up!
You nailed it!
Your exact email info is exactly what happened to me!
Just awful, I got knocked off week of Thanksgiving by GOOGLE !!! (bitter pill)
Can’t wait till reveiw of SEO Elite!
Thanks
ralph
Brad - Thank you for the information about Google’s latest “tweak”. My site has been spidered but is not in Google yet, so I will make sure I use the proper caution in my backward links.
Acorn Computers
Wow, great update, Thanks! This stuff is a constantly moving target, ain’t it?
Does this mean that anyone that links to microsoft or adobe will get those sites dropped from google for having too many incoming links with the same text??
Thanks for the heads up. All those question marks do make this hard reading though!
Thanks for the insight on what was happening because I was PR 1 and totally dropped off. Should I just get rid of my link page or create another one without the word link in it? I await your update.
Thanks again
Steph
Hi Brad - great research shared.
Wonder if you (or anyone else reading this) has
an opinion on why my site over at: http://www.rapid-weight-loss (40 backlinks showing in Yahoo) has not been listed on Google for well over 8-months now. It has been completely
hand developed - no tricks and lots of content.
I have many other domains and sites online, this one stumps the heck out of me.
If anyone has any insight, I am all ears!!
Thanks,
Jeff
jeff@infoproductcreator.com
Hi Brad,
Thanks for the information. I am going to pull out my trusty optilink and dust it off in a few. I may need to do some tweeking. I can really appreciate the logical and methodical approach that you take to analyzing what Google is doing. You really make it practical to the green newbies (smile).
John
Teething
By following this logic, wouldn’t CNN be dropped when searching for “news”?
– Scott
I own over 6 million pages online. I was making tons of money for the last two years and then December 16, 2004 Google booted 98% of my best stuff to page 6 or 7. I am losing 50% of my sales. Now I know why!
Thann you,
Mark
Brad,
As you know, there is another theory that could possibly explain this ‘dropout’ phenomenon. The same thing happened to me with a client site. We were gaining rapidly, then BAM — completely gone.
What do you think about the ‘Ssndbox’ theory that says Google will hold new sites in a sort of waiting cue before they give them a high rank. Have you found that new domains have something to do with this? The site I’m referring to was indexed under http://www.knee-replacement-info.com, then we changed it to a new domain of http://www.KneeReplacementInfo.com and got dropped shortlty thereafter.
We were also buying links and doing a lot of directory submissions and link trading at the time, so it is hard to say what caused the drop.
Thanks,
Doug
http://www.marketingpathway.com
Great article!
To bad high page rank for my home page isn’t a proble yet!
Ed Aw
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Bowling Balls, Bowling Shirts and Bowling Everything
Bowling Tips for Better Bowling
Brad - since /links/index.html is destined for exclusion or penalty eventually - what would you recommend we call our “links” page, and what would be your recommendation on the Link Text on the home page to this important file?
Rick
Hey Brad:
I’ve been having “google-battles” since buying your information.
Notwithstanding I AM ranked very high for my keywords on Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista etc etc
But Google, since day 1, has been mostly impossible to crack in my keywords. In fact, mostly all the top ranked sites with keywords I use are UK sites.
I really beleive that now that Google is a publicly traded stock with fiduciary reponsiblities to shareholder profits….more and more people will be frustrated and “steered” to AdWords. IMHO.
I know Google is the man right now - but I’m happy being ranked high in the other search engines without such an intense case of aggita.
Thanks for all your help. Your course was awesome (the fruits are being reaped about 3-4 months later
)
John
Brad:
Do you think that adding links with different anchor text will bring a site back if it has been put back 6 or 7 pages?
Brad:
Do you know what affect Yahoo & MSN as well? Two #1 major keywords, drop to #26 & #72, one#12 drop to #26.
G* also drop from # 68 to #212, these drop pretty much all happen at same time.
I have one keyword SERPs is disappeared from # 348, only has few back links on the page, but all with high PR (one PR7, one PR 6, two PR 5) , similar text of a very competitive keywords.
I have two site wide links now; one is a directory, one is a newer entertainment news site.
I wonder should I take them off? what happen to the theory that your competitor can take you out by run a site wide links to you?
Bigd
Wireless Speakers
Home Theater Speakers
Good article. Interestingly, James Martel thought the same thing had happened to some of his sites following the Florida update and was recommending that people begin mixing their anchor text links for the same reason. He noted that his early sites that all had the same anchor text links were dropped, but his newer sites where that wasn’t true did not lose position. In either case, it is probably good to follow this advice and begin mixing the text in the anchor text. However, as some have noted here, that does present some problems of its own, including what will happen to a large site that is ranking well on Yahoo and MSN if all of a sudden the “home” page link gets changed back to “home” once again rather that “keyword home” etc.
One more comment in reference to Jeff’s post above. Don’t know why your site has not been spidered fully by Google, but I did note that your sitemap.html links were broken. I might recommend two things to help get your site indexed by Google. Since you have a “weightloss” or “Diet” site, there is always something in the news relative to this topic area. Grab on to some current item in the news relative to this topic area and write up a press release on http://www.prweb.com and send it with your resource box link pointed to your site. Second, go to Blogger.com and start a Blog on this topic with links back to your site, then go to myYahoo and link your Blog RSS feed to your myYahoo page, this will send the Yahoo slurp spider to your blog and then to your site. Google will soon follow if you update your blog every couple of days with a short topic relevant posting.
Thanks for sharing this great information. Trying to guess what G. does and why can be a formidable task. But the sample size seems reasonable. So I’d be inclined to think your theory is valid. I wonder how many sites were really affected. And what keywords or categories of keywords this filter targets…
———————————–
eCommerce Integrations
Brad, this is without a doubt one of the best Stomper posts yet.
If 10,000 identical backlinks is way too many, how many is okay? Should we have our staff mix up the link trades daily, weekly etc? Any testing yet?
Given all of that, there must be some other factors going on. If you search news CNN still comes up and if you seach Click Here Adobe acrobat is still on top.
Anthony Kane
ADD ADHD Advances
http://addadhdadvances.com
The Harp & Bagpipe
http://store.harp-bagpipe.com
If this is the case why did myweddingfavors.com not get effected?
Well that explains my suspicions!
Some time ago Dinosaur Birthday Party was ranking very well in Google and now is gone.
To counter what I suspected I wrote 3-Ciprocal Linking to Improve Page Rank
- A legitimate way to stay ahead of the Search Engine Algorithms.
My plan is to develop a method to help folks manage the 3Ciprocal process.
If anyone is interested in working on this with me, please feel free to drop me a note.
Bert
The Antonik Network (SEO / SEM)
Brad,
Thanks for the advice, I will look forward for the next update.
By the way, I wanted to ask your opinion about an article that I found yesterday that talks about “Stealing Page Rank” through a “Redirection Page”.
I read it and it makes sense to me but I would like to hear your opinion. You can check the article here /a>
Just scroll down to the topic #2 and #3.
Thanks
Hector Sanchez
My-Dog-Supplies.com
Sorry folks, on my last comment, I didn’t write correctly the URL address of the article that talks about “Stealing or Faking Page Rank” for your review.
I hope that you Brad can check it out and give us some comments about it. It sounds too good to be true.
Here it is http://www.trafficology.com/thelastnewsletter.html or Click Here
Thanks
Hector Sanchez
My-Dog-Supplies.com
Thank for the update Brad. In spite of my best efforts, my site is still not coming up on Google or Yahoo for the keywords I want so I guess I’m not affected. Interesting though, my site comes up in the top 10 for my main keywords in the MSN Beta (as it stands now). And I was just about to buy some links to help the Google/Yahoo, matter out, so thanks for the update.
Garmin GPS, Garmin GPS Software & Accessories
If google is now punishing sites with too many links then I’m very curious to know what basis they will be using for indexing. I was going to start getting links to my new site about pets and now I’m totally confused as to what to do. I’m assuming that buying links on an auction site would also be an iffy proposition.
It is hard to determine what level is over done now
Looking forward to the next Stomper Update — a new way to get a few hundred incoming links for less than $20.
We are also experimenting with an AdWords campaign, thanks for your advice.
Color Point, Feng Shui, Meditation and Search Engine Services - Words, Music And Silence From UK Osho Centres and Search Engine Services from OmWeb. We also supply complementary health courses on Color Point, Feng Shui, Palm Reading . . .
As you never really know how giigle’s algorithm works the best approach (IMO) is to gradually increase the number of links pointing to your site - for ever (just keep building links as long as your site lives).
This helps to keep it natural.
And use Brad’s advice to use anchor text that doesn’t contain your keywords as well.
I admit that giigle can give you a lot of traffic , but if you do get bombed there’s other big SEs out there as well that are vying for the #1 spot.
A couple of my sites that google saw fit to drop earlier this year are no wgetting way more traffic from yoohoo than they ever did from giigle.
Mike
Mike’s Health Directory
Thanks Brad for the post. It has been very interesting to read about your theories and the experience of the other readers. Other than NOT selling physical products online, my site matches exactly your other criteria.
In my case I went from being on the first page in G for “Excel Online Training” to position 60, however I stii retain No.2 Position in Yahoo and No.5 in Yahoo for “Excel Training”.
What I find interesting though is that the backlinks I had bought were directed to just one page on my site with the anchor text “mortage calculator”. This page has also been knocked as well.
All other links to my site are “natural” and have occured because I provide good content. The name of my site is ExcelOnlineTraining.com so it is quite common for others to use this as the anchor text. Do you think it is advisable to write to people and ask then NOT to use the name of my site when linking to me?
This does seem a little bit of overkill. Does this beg the question “Should we now buy a domain name that has nothing to do with the content of our site”?
Thanks for the great information.
Ian Worrall
Hi Brad and Everyone
Fantastic post, and timely too. I had just bought a whole bunch of text links after Stomper. But I am nowhere in the range of 10,000 so maybe I am not affected. Having said that, my site traffic has dropped int he last couple of months, but I attributed that to me being too busy to do much active link exchanging, which I think is still true.
I guess I have some questions from your post -
I’ll echo someone else’s question on the ‘10,000′ number. How many is too many, as a guestimate. Were all these sites you mention numbering up that high?
Does it matter the type of links bought? ie. does the matter of ‘topic related’ mitigate the effect somewhat, or is it a numeric flag?
If your keyword is in your url, but run together like mine is (vitaminstohealth), would that count as containing the keyword ‘vitamins’ if the url was used as linking text?
A possible ‘antidote’ that keeps the ‘foward momentum’ of linking might be to just keep linking and so dilute the % of your keywords pointing back.
Thanks a lot for the heads up!
Rebecca
Search Engine ranking requires a lot of work physically and mentally. It seems to really get more complicated each passing day.
I do find the information for the coarse I have purchased to be very informative. My first website is starting to rank on up and the orders are becoming more steady. Now off to my second venture. Thanks.
Anthony Summerford
PurrfectKreations - Pet Beds and
Outdoor Cushions
NaughtyNitesLingerie - We Make
Your Fantasies Become a Reality
google has a list of ‘trusted’ sites. it includes Yahoo, DMOZ, PBS.org, National Geographic, CNN, ZDnet, etc. those don’t get penalized…
i’m sure adobe is in that list too.
nick
With every change that Google makes I find it harder and harder not to buy into the theory that Googles motivation is purely driven by their new fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders.
Hey Google Dudes it this is the case please stop jerking everybody around and just change your format to a purely PPC like Overture. You will save us all a lot of wasted time and effort!
Jim, http://www.pitbull-directory.com
It’s all too much to keep up with at times. We have to be full-time SE geeks to keep up with the changes… and I don’t know about you folks, but I have a life outside all this stuff. How much more time can I spend to get ahead? I ask myself.
Get links, as many as you can to beat your competition… use your keywords in your anchor text… do honest link exchanges… post to blogs… post to forums… use a signature link w/keywords… Google catches on that folks are getting ranking and **BAM** changes the rules so small businesses honestly trying to get noticed in the SE’s get the biggest brunt of the “changes”…. WHAT IS THE PURPOSE??
The honest folks trying to start an online store business… we try and learn all this SEO for the sake of getting our buisness off the ground - to grow… Are we NOT suppose to prosper? Are we NOT suppose to be found in the SEs so that we can acquire more sales? Do the Google “spies” sit around and think of ways to screw the little guy trying to make it? Yeah, right… they are going after those evil spammers… WHO are they really hurting??? The honest business owner trying to make it.
It’s all too much to keep up with at times. G can kiss my a*s.
Tired,
Valerie
Good Stuff Like always
let’s keep linking 
Antti,
let’s make it home then
dam they just keep changing it fast…well i go home
I can’t wait until MSN kicks Google’s A*S*S in the search arena so we won’t have to deal with their high-handed tactics anymore…
Since G is the bread and butter for a lot of us, we really don’t have much choice except to acknowledge the change and roll with the punches. It is very frustrating to work hard and have G knock us down at their discretion. But nevertheless, it’s part of the business that we all choose to be in. In spite of the fact that we sometimes are at G’s mercy.
Chin up everyone. We will succeed.
Triple scented soy candles and gel candles
There is definitely a lot to SEO. It would seem like if a person had enough sites they could eventually ge5t a really good handle on the G*^gle alg orithm… I tell all my mathematic freinds that if they could ever crack the alg. then they could be rich… because people like you me and everyone else would pay them for it… Oh well. Glad we’ve got some thinkers watching it.
See business books recommended by James Judd.
I’ve been wondering how I could be #1 in yahoo and nowhere at all in Google. And I only have about 20 incoming links to that site.
It makes things interesting, but really weird.
Do you think they don’t like us or are they just having a great time running experiments?
My Mortgage Comparison page doesn’t appear anywhere, either.
I’m wondering once a site is banned from google from spamming is the domain name banned forever? Do they allow for any ‘fattening up’ of sites with doorway pages to catch keywords at all?? And do the spiders read .php files the same as .html? Where is a good place to start on this. Thanks.
Norm
Boneafied.com
Great information info all year. I’ve been lurking so I just wanted to say thanks and happy new year to all.
Elana
Can someone point me to information regarding the importance (or not) of hosting and linking sites that are from different servers / in different parts of the world as opposed to say linking together sites that are all hosted on the same backbone?? It would appear to me this would be an important factor to popularity is not through nepotism.
Ross from Web-Branding.com
Web-Branding.com
Thanks Brad for a lot of good and “accurate” information. I have a new website that Google has not ranked yet and you have the best and most straight forward info I have found anywhere. Stomping the Search Engines is a superb resource.
Boyd
Thanks Brad for the advice.
I was wondering what to do to score well with MSN. I think that we are going to see them knock off Google within the next few years. It would be a good idea to position ourselves for that.
Thanks.
ADD ADHD Advances
The Harp & Bagpipe
I look forward to finding out how to get hundreds of links for under $20. Thanks for all the info.
So Much Glassware
Seems like a dirty trick to pull right before Christmas - the busiest time of the year for some. If they had some sense of morality, they would’ve waited until after the new year.
We still are not able to rank higher than 400 in Google, but we’ve now hit #2 in Yahoo and #7 in MSN. We’ll keep working at it until we break through.
I am concerned that Google is only showing 1 backlink, but we have over 6000. What’s the point of their backlink checker tool? It’s garbage, probably soon to be obsolete….
Bob
Discount Web Hosting-Linux Web Hosting and web hosting services
I gave up on Google months ago and now concentrate on MSN and Yahoo. The time I’ve saved on not optimizing for Google has been a Godsend - particularly on my mental health. To all you naysayers, yes,I still have good traffic figures.
If more of you would do the same, perhaps we could minimize the importance of Google, which, to me, has always appeared overblown.
I gave up on Google months ago and now concentrate on MSN and Yahoo. The time I’ve saved on not optimizing for Google has been a Godsend - particularly on my mental health. To all you naysayers, yes,I still have good traffic figures.
If more of you would do the same, perhaps we could minimize the importance of Google, which, to me, has always appeared overblown.
Google is definitely a tougher nut to crack then Yahoo or MSN. They take longer to index and change their rules much more often. I’m looking forward to MSN’s challenge to them.
Happy New Year, everyone!
Soy candles and gel candles
Personalized gifts and engraved gifts
Hi Brad,
Thanks for the heads-up.
1. Anyone know if this new Google Link Trap filter is being applied to large (20 to 30k pages) content-centric sites, rather than stores, as Brod’s post suggest?
2. Anyone know if the new Link Trap filter only effects the rankings for pages that are the recipient of the ROS links, or will the rankings for other pages in the site be affected as well?
Thanks, George
Hi - I have a quick question.
How do you know if Google is banning your site or got it on hold somehow?
We have had our site waiting for 5 months now
http://foot-care.net
we have submitted to Paid - Yahoo directory
and have a page 5 rank site linking directly to the site, but cannot get it onto google.
Any help appreciated
Ashton
Hi Everyone,
I have noticed some bizarre results from Google searches over the past week. I was wondering if anyone else had experienced this as well.
As an example if I type in VLOOKUP as the keyword to search on (which is an Excel spreadsheet function BTW) the second place result has the title “Meet Sexy Singles” which seems to me to be as far removed from spreadsheets as you can get!
I clicked on the link to do a search on the site for “VLOOKUP” and it could not find that phrase.
What on earth is going on?
Ian Worrall
http://www.ExcelOnlineTraining.com
After reviewing each of my sites, and monitoring G*#gle weekly, IMO this Link Trap has been in effect for at least several months. It’s the only reason I can imagine why one of my well-ranked “mature” Sites “fell off the face of the earth” months ago. It’s just something else we have to manage in order to please G^^gle.
Tom
Affordable Panama City Beach Rentals
Luxurious Panama City Beach Condo Rentals
New Car Purchase Secrets
Hi:
Just bought the Stomper CD set and am halfway through it - I am already scared at how much we’ve accomplished withOUT any of this stuff and looking forward to the results from starting to implement some of the techniques.
One of the big problems we have is the subject nature of our site - we run a dat*ing site for people with herpes and HPV - many people have herpes (25%) but don’t want others to know, so getting someone to add a link on their site is sometimes not all that easy. We have an affiliate program though and I’m hoping to learn that http://www.mpwh.net/?abc counts as a link to http://www.mpwh.net/, in other words that all the affiliate links are relevant.
Note, I had to put a * inside the word dat*ing to get it posted here, I already see that I have my work cut out!
Talk to you all soon…
Hi Ashton,
I took a look at your foot care site and if you have had links pointed to it for 5 months now you have been penalized. Your site has not been indexed by Google or has been un-index either way not good. I have over 100 sites and have had about 45 of them hit with PR0 that have had PR4 to PR6 and no where to be found in Google. However the good news is some of them do great in Yahoo and MSN. I get banned or penalized by Google I make more sites and keep on going the money is just to good to give up.
Brad,
It seems that if purchasing blocks of links, it would make sense if you bought another block with another keyword text link, bringing down the percentage of links with identical text links. Just a thought.
Ron
home remedies and natural cures Natural home remedies.