It’s snowing, here in Long Island. It’s not amounting to much, but parents all over (this morning) were nagged by their children to see if school was closed? With the internet being second nature to people, one parent went on Google and typed in Long Island School Closings. They found our page, (clearly with a time and date stamp on it) from 12/21/2009 and saw that their school was in fact closed. She then proceeded to call all of her friends and neighbors, informing them that their school was closed.

By 10am, we received this letter:

Your web site today listed the XYZ Schools as a two hour delayed opening today (January 8, 2010) due to snow.For your information, the school district opened on time.  You listed many other schools as delayed opening or being closed.  They also opened on time.
I am going to recommend to our school superintendent that she have no contact with your paper any longer regarding school closings.  Maybe other parents in other school districts will take the same action based on your providing misinformation this morning.

This was a good learning lesson, in that we did not have one centralized place for “School Closings”. The writers published the story as an article. An easy fix for that was to create a new section named “/schoolclosings”.

Because I want to utilize the SERP position we had for that term,we created outbound links from the page, that Google knew of and directed it to our new page. We did our proper optimization (H1, H2, summary description) of the new page. We also changed the text on the page to read “No School Closings Reported for 1/8/2010″ – only below the link to our new page.

Sometime next week I will request that Google removes the old page from their index. It’s a very simple two-step process:

• Add a line to our robots.txt file ( Disallow: /2009/12/long-island-school-closings-and-delays/)
• Using the Google Webpage Removal Request Tool, request that they remove the outdated content.

Again, it was a very easy fix and a great exercise for everyone involved.

Fast forward a few months into this new revenue generating area and Google makes it very well known that this is not acceptable. Matt Cutts released a post on his blog “How to report paid links”, dated 4/14/2007. Shortly after links on these well known sites disappeared. Matt Cutts is currently the head of Google’s Web spam team.

Don’t get me wrong, in the “black-hat” (SEO) world, this is still a common practice. It’s just not as obvious, anymore. To show you how obvious it was, Matt posted the following example that was posted on a site dedicated to linux:

People have become more and more clever in disguising links and hiding them. What I’ve seen is people using div tags to place text <insert random number> pixels away from the viewable area ( x axis = -500) or just making the font size zero.

I recenlty came across a site that had a pretty nice (non-flash) transitional effect on the page. Like any other code guy, I viewed the source code, to my surprise though I found this (at the bottom of the page):

The weird thing was that it didn’t show up on the home page. Weird, right? OK, sarcasim aside I did drink the paid link kool-aid back in 2006 but I never hid the links. They were present on the page as “Links you may like”. Hiding links and text is pure black-hat SEO. So I took great pleasure in notifying Google.

Where do I go to tell Google about paid links?

Google has set up a page where users can keep their anonymity;  report pages: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?hl=en

I decided to use the spam report, while logged into my webmaster account. I personally have nothing to hide and why not add credibilty to the report. I couldn’t even imagine how many faceless, nameless reports Google must receive about paid link sites. With that said I used https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en.

In less than 48 hours, I received the following message (in my Google Webmaster account):

Thank you for submitting a spam report for this site: http://www.<somesite>.com/

We take the quality of our results very seriously, and we thoroughly investigate every report of deceptive practices and take appropriate action when we uncover genuine abuse. In especially egregious cases, we will remove spammy websites from our index immediately, so they don’t show up in search results at all. At a minimum, we’ll use the data from each spam report to improve our site ranking and filtering algorithms, which, over time, should increase the quality of our results.

We appreciate your taking the time to help us improve our service for your fellow users around the world. By helping us eliminate spam, you’re saving millions of people time, effort and energy.

Around the same time I noticed that all of the pages that Google had in their index for this site have now been fully removed from. Doing a query of site:www.<somesite>.com yields zero results. They don’t even show up for their name. Nada, nothing!

For the few hundred dollars this company might have received to promote Plavix, I sure hope it was worth losing all their organic traffic from Google.