money.co.uk - Now a PR0

[Clinton]

money.co.uk - a major UK finance site - is a PR0. Strange, I thought.

Then I did some digging and found this article.

In short, the site made up a fake story about a boy using his dad's credit card to pay for hookers. The story got picked up by various news outlets and money.co.uk got themselves a ton of links.

When it emerged that the story was not for real Google manually nuked all their PR!

Manually (according to St Cutts).

So it's not just dodgy link selling that can lose you the (mostly) useless green pixels.

Moral: Leave hookers alone.

[JJMcClure]

Yeah I heard about that, I don't think Google should have nerfed those links, so what if the story wasn't true, it went viral and got a lot of links, we should all be so successful. I'm a huge Google fan but I don't want them to become the internet morals police. Anyway, what's wrong with WoW, I play it.....

[benitez17]

Yeah I heard about that, I don't think Google should have nerfed those links, so what if the story wasn't true, it went viral and got a lot of links, we should all be so successful. I'm a huge Google fan but I don't want them to become the internet morals police. Anyway, what's wrong with WoW, I play it.....

I'm not much of a fan of Google for reasons like this. For some reason, they feel like they should be the judge, jury, and executioner for all content online, and they are more than happy to throw their enormous weight around to get their way. Also, they seem to operate under the rule of "Do as I say, not as I do" a little too often for a company whose stated goal is to do no evil.

[hooperman]

Well it is Google's index, and they can modify it how they see fit. It would be interesting to know whether they suffered any loss in rankings or traffic because of this. Hopefully, they weren't too reliant on organic Google search traffic. I do notice that there's a disclaimer there now saying "NB: This story is a parody and is not intended to be taken seriously." Ha - too late!

If they fabricated the story simply to gain more links to get more traffic then I think the hit is well deserved, though.

[benitez17]

Sure, I realize that Google can modify their index as they see fit, and I don't really have a problem with it in theory. What annoys me is the condescending attitude that emanates from Cutts and the others who look for sites to knock down, the fact that there are so many websites that the enforcement of their rules is pretty much arbitrary, there is no real way to appeal (at least from what I have seen and heard from people who have had issues), and I would rather they avoid relying on the subjective opinion of people who work there and focus on the results from their algorithms.

In this example, the story generated a lot of interest, and a number of people linked to it. I'm sure people were still passing it around in forums and on blogs well after it had been proven false because they found it to be funny, and Google's staff has decided that they don't agree with the state of the Internet or their own search engine's results in this instance and came up with a crude "fix" rather than making an intelligent improvement to their ranking criteria.

[JJMcClure]

If they fabricated the story simply to gain more links to get more traffic then I think the hit is well deserved, though.

Why is it deserved? Do you have to be honest to earn rankings now, and who's going to police that? I love Google as you well know but they're a search engine not the Morality Police and they should keep out of it. Will sites like the 'Onion' get special dispensation in the irony stakes or will they get hit too? What about political or so called 'news' sites that regularly lie through their teeth, will they get hit?

I think there must be more to this story than the fact that the item which acqired all the links wasn't true.

[hooperman]

I love Google as you well know but they're a search engine not the Morality Police and they should keep out of it.

I never said that Google had an obligation to weed out lyers and deceivers, only that if the site was relying on deceit to gain rankings then it deserved the hit. This is just my moral standpoint, not a suggestion that Google start their own moral crusade.

[JJMcClure]

I never said that Google had an obligation to weed out lyers and deceivers, only that if the site was relying on deceit to gain rankings then it deserved the hit.

I'm not being obtuse, I really don't understand the distinction you're making here. So what if the site relied on deceit, in the natural process of things that deceit will come to light, just as it did, and it's up to the site's users to decide if they want to use that site or not and the site will reap what it has sown. I object to Google stepping in with a subjective action. Where do you draw the line if you start doing that?

I just think there's more to this story than meets the eye.

[Clinton]

Anyone remembers the BMW case? What did they get the manual ban for?

[petertdavis]

Cloaking