Overstock games Google

[slotplayer]

"Google has manually demoted Overstock.com in its search results to penalize the company for trying to game Google's search algorithm."


http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Google...5&asset=&ccode=

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

Interesting - where is your source?

[slotplayer]

Interesting - where is your source?

I posted the link to the story.

[WinYourWayKyle]

I guess this would be considered Black Hat advertising for overstock?
Could this have more serious long term effects in Google rankings?

[belgamo]

Seems as the major papers are picking up on this too.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/busines...ckdown/1154427

[davenewgates]

Good thing that google did an immediate action to what overstock has done, this will warn all those who are thinking of doing the same

[craig96]

A few things:

Just read the following post
ditii.com/2011/02/24/overstock-com-faces-google-penalty-against-paid-links-links-for-discounts-deal/

And it seem the page that was penalized was
overstock.com/Home-Garden/VacuumCleaners/2004/subcat.html
as it does not seem to show up for me.

Tbh asking someone to link to you in exchange for a discount is not too bad in my eyes. I guess that is the new paid link schemes. I have tbh that quite a few sites rank that do paid advertising that are not being punished.

[shortow]

This becomes even more interesting when you take a look at the below thread

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4252178.htm

For those who can't be bothered scrolling through hundreds of posts in this thread, in a nutshell....

1. a member notes that overstock's rankings have skyrocketed in recent months and proposes a member workshop/brainstorm as to how they did it
2. it's identified that they have managed to acquire a ton of .edu links to product category pages over the last couple of years
3. its then discovered that they have a promo policy giving students and staff at universities a 10% discount on purchases for posting links to overstock.com pages
4. their pdf promo manual, actually setting out what anchor text and and urls to use is posted
5. a VERY active debate as to whether this is black or white hat ensues...as well as questions regarding members interests/motivations in exposing the strategy
6. Bang...couple of weeks later Overstocked gets whacked by Google and the news reports start to appear.

whether or not discounting for links is blackhat or in violation of Google's quality guidelines can be be debated ad nauseum. The interesting thing for me was how closely Google are listening to the big seo forums.

[universal4]

Thanks for that, saves a lot of reading.....

[Vrindavan]

I think this is white hat
but it is trying to manipulate Google's ranking artificially.

[Wildnettechnologies]

Thanks for sharing it for the Google related information...