Perhaps more amazing even than Interflora incurring the wrath of Google a few weeks ago has been the speed of their recovery. Within a fortnight or so of being dropped from every major result due to an aggressive paid link and semi black hat web campaign, the floral giants are back in business, with just a blip in their analytics graph to show for it. So what did they do, and could such tactics of recovery be able to normal sites?
Most of this is conjecture because, obviously Interflora haven’t been releasing screen shots of their webmaster tools and Analytics accounts but a huge amount of industry pundits have been thinking and writing about this because of the implications it has for the rest of the industry. In going after a huge corporation like Interflora Google showed that they have no fear of taking down the biggest site if they feel it contravenes their guidelines on search ethics. Most people with their head out of the sand were well aware of that already but a little shock and awe has certainly reinforced that message this month!
Why did Interflora get banned?
- Mass Advertorials on Local Papers
- Link wheels or spammy tiered link building
- Lack of powerful or high trust links
- Paid blog posts on abandoned sites
- Links on sites with Pagerank penalties
- Low quality directory links
- Use of blog networks or links on sites owned by same individual
How did they recover?
Well, let’s be honest, the fact that they’re the biggest flower business in the world probably helped. Their Google Adwords spend, probably in the tens of thousands per week, might go a little further to endearing them to the good people at G. More than this, however, evidence points to them making a substantial effort to clean up their act once the likelihood of a penalty was felt – perhaps even before their rankings drop. Huge numbers of bloggers were contacted to ask them to remove their links.
None of this, however, really factors in the speed of Interflora’s recovery. Even were they using the Google disavow tool like madmen, a normal recrawl would have taken a significant amount of time before all of the negatively impacting links were discounted. No, the evidence here points to the fact that, while Google wanted to make an example of the naughty children in class they didn’t want to expel them, given their parents are such a massive deal. So this was a token gesture.
What does this mean for normal businesses without the power of a super brand behind them?
A serious Google penalty is very rarely recovered from. This story has indicated, once again, the importance of safe and ‘acceptable’ linkbuilding, and the obvious penalties for failure. If you’re unsure of how you’re doing, check our the Link Detox tool here which is useful.
Our biggest tip of all is to focus not on your links but your brand. The bigger company you are, the more well known, the closer to being a figurehead in your industry, the more you will rank regardless of all the minutiae of the SEO world.