Over the weekend, Mother's Day weekend, the New York Times released a story named Trying to Game Google on 'Mother's Day Flowers'.
This article pretty much called out a few popular flower selling sites for manipulating Google's search results with the use of buying links.
Unlike J.C. Penney, Overstock.com and Forbes - no action was actually taken by Google.
Normally when a major publication writes about Google link spam issues, Google will react and take action. Not this time.
Google told the NY Times:
None of the links shared by The New York Times had a significant impact on our rankings, due to automated systems we have in place to assess the relevance of links.
You and I know that Google does have ways to handle and discount a lot of unnatural links without actually penalizing the sites with those links. But for Google to say this, maybe it is Google telling the major publications - enough! Google has ways to report spam outside of making Google look bad. Here maybe Google is saying, we aren't dumb, we know sites use link buying to try to artificially inflate their rankings and we take care of it already - so stop trying to make us look bad?
What do you think?
Forum discussion at Sphinn & WebmasterWorld.
