Email Reputation Causes Penalties in Google Search Results

http://www.lockergnome.com/web/2011/05/29/email-reputation-causes-penalties-in-google-search-results/

by joahua • 15 years ago

77 46 15 years ago

joahua2• 15 years ago

FWIW, mail service Campaign Monitor have picked up on this as possibly true, while stopping short on actually advising people to make list changes as a result:

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/3486/do-email-newsl...

dasil003• 15 years ago

Of course it hurts their bottom line, so any sliver of a doubt would be reason not to be prescriptive about it.

wcpreston• 15 years ago

Or....

Their point is totally valid. There is no way reliable way to know who DOESN'T open your emails. You can get a list of who definitely opened your email AND said "OK to loading images and/or clicked on a link in the email. But if they don't load images and/or don't click on a link, you have no idea if they opened your email or not. Maybe they're a privacy nut, so they're read your email then type in your website's URL into your browser instead of clicking the link in your email (because they know you or someone is tracking who clicks on what).

Assuming that it is true that Google is NOT linking the two together, I see no reason to delete subscribers that APPEAR inactive.

ktsmith• 15 years ago

That's not what the blog entry at campaign monitor says at all.

> Personally, I haven't seen or heard of any evidence to back up this claim, beyond the anecdotal - as yet, there is no official information from Google linking email reputation to search results.

All the campaign monitor blog post says is that if it's true it has interesting implications.

joahua2• 15 years ago

Hence 'possibly' - they thought it relevant enough to share, even in its unconfirmed state. Sorry if I made that more ambiguous than it should've been...

CM seem to be pretty good at taking a long term view of how to do email marketing given a lot of their own marketing targets white label types (small agencies, etc.)... Often the same people managing websites. That said, there must be a slight conflict in their desire to keep list sizes up (check out http://www.campaignmonitor.com/pricing/ for why) in the short term.

Why wouldn't Google use data they have to improve quality? I'm not convinced they're doing it as the post reports, and there are probably privacy ramifications (like, oh my gosh, Google actually read my email I host with them for more than targeted ads?), but it doesn't take a lot of mental gymnastics to arrive at what the post suggests as yet-another-metric for page ranking.

In terms of its relative value, though, to what extent could Google Apps/Gmail users be deemed "typical" searchers if this were occurring?

roshodgekiss3• 15 years ago

Ros from Campaign Monitor here - I've just updated the post based on Matt's contribution above.

It would have been very unwise to recommend that any sender (not just our customers) change how they manage their lists based on an anecdotal report, thus we really did stress that there was no evidence at this stage to back up the claims in the original Lockergnome post.

jakeludington4• 15 years ago

Ros, if you don't recommend your customers keep their lists clean of inactive users, regardless of SEO impact, you are doing them a huge disservice.

kmort• 15 years ago

"There’s really only one way to solve an email reputation problem. You have to make an effort to clean up your list. Here again I was thankful for the awesome reporting built into Aweber. I was able to quickly track down which subscribers were receiving my emails via @gmail.com addresses but not opening the email."

Does this reporting use some method other than tracked image loading (which GMail disables by default)?

jakeludington4• 15 years ago

Many email services use an implied open which is based on clicking on a link in the email, because you can't click on something you never opened.

Those people are actually more active than someone simply reading an email and if you have an email list full of subscribers who never click on anything, you have a very disengaged list.

JoshTriplett• 15 years ago

Depends heavily on the email in question. If your email exists primarily to point people off to links elsewhere, then sure, you can measure "success" by how many people click those links; if you actually put useful content in your email, people might read your mail for its content and get value out of it whether or not they click the links.

Matt_Cutts6• 15 years ago

I left a "this isn't true" comment on the original thread but I think the comment will need moderator approval.

roshodgekiss3• 15 years ago

Sorry Matt, just approved it then. Thanks for weighing in on this thread, it's really appreciated.

Matt_Cutts6• 15 years ago

No worries, happy to clarify.

redthrowaway2• 15 years ago

Are you at liberty to speculate why those sites may have seen a big dip in Google referrals, or would that be giving away too much of your spam fighting wizardry?

Matt_Cutts6• 15 years ago

We can't go into detail about specific signals because we don't want them to be gamed, but we did do a blog post with advice for publishers about this update: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guid...

jakeludington4• 15 years ago

Matt you left a "this isn't true" without actually saying what about my article isn't true. In fact, you singled out one sentence in the article as being untrue, which would suggest you consider the rest of the article to be true.

lotharbot• 15 years ago

> you singled out one sentence in the article as being untrue, which would suggest you consider the rest of the article to be true.

This is not even remotely valid reasoning.

He weighed in on one part of your article because he's in a special position to know whether or not it's true. Choosing not to weigh in on the rest of the article says nothing about his opinion of the rest of it.

skitzzo2• 15 years ago

Matt, feel free to answer this in either place but you singled out a sentence in the post and claimed it wasn't true.

Then you followed that statement up by saying that the title isn't true.

While I most definitely appreciate you weighing in on the issue, I feel you would better serve readers by explaining whether the initial statement, the title, or both are inaccurate.

Are you saying email reputation wasn't the reason his site was penalized, that he didn't have a tip from a Google employee, or that email reputation doesn't factor into the search rankings?

lionhearted• 15 years ago

Hey Matt,

It's been said before, but I just wanted to say thanks again for coming into HN and sharing some perspective. It's very cool and insightful and appreciated.

OpenAlgorithm• 15 years ago

Posted this on the original article, but had a feeling you might not return, so here goes:

Surely that points a crucial flaw in the system, how can you manually penalize a site and not put any tests in place that would let you know when the reasons for the penalization have been removed.

If Jake hadn't filed a reconsideration request he would have continued to be "trusted less" by Google thus presumably receiving less traffic.

Google should create a simple algorithm that would alert the webspam team who I presume take the manual action on websites that the reason for penalty has been removed and they should take another manual look at it.

As I see it the only reason Jake was informed of such penalization is because he filed a recon request, what about the thousands of other websites who inadvertently had bad links or another reason for penalization on the site and didn't sport the traffic dip and didn't file a request.

Maybe I'm wrong, Matt, do Google have these stops/tests/algorithms in place to stop incorrect penalization?

jeffreyrusso• 15 years ago

Two prudent things to do when you see someone claiming to have insight into search algorithms -

Ask where they are getting their information. "A source at Google" doesn't cut it.

Ask yourself how much sense it makes. What is the likelihood that this could be a signal that improves search quality without causing significant collateral damage? Pretty low in this case.

I can think of plenty of genuinely high quality sites that do a horrible job with email. They probably send bad user signals through Gmail - but why should that impact web search? It shouldn't, and it doesn't.

itswindy4• 15 years ago

>> "without causing significant collateral damage?"

Google worries about collateral damage only for top sites and that's so Google is not embarrassed.

bigiain• 15 years ago

I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn this isn't _technically_ true (as Matt Cutts says), but that something like it is indeed a signal in the search algorithm which in at least some cases produces the behaviour described.

I'd be very cautious advising clients to have links to their websites sent out in large, obviously spammy email campaigns.

Matt's quite likely being 100% honest when he says the domain sending the mail doesn't get penalised in search.

I wonder if he'd be quite as quick to explain whether the domains in links inside spam received by gmail are fed back into the search algorithm (or, if gmail doesn't feed that directly, whether the search team use honeypot gmail accounts to find it out themselves...)

extension• 15 years ago

I suspect that if the email rep theory were anywhere close to true, Google would just keep their mouths shut about it rather than tapdance around the truth.

But it might be an unintended side-effect of their obviously complex algorithm, which they are probably investigating right now.

kanetrain2• 15 years ago

I know for a fact that Gmail has implemented some (overly aggressive, and really far-reaching) "spam" triggers over the last few months. Many of them have been scaled way back over the past few weeks but the crux of the new Gmail "spam" filters centered around what Jake is explaining here: Non-engagement.

This is troubling in it's own right because of the possibility of exploitation for nefarious purposes to hurt someone else's site. I did not know about the possibility of search results being affected by the same overly-aggressive spam filters. This may not be the case, but if this is true, it is troubling.

The notion that email engagement is a good indicator of a site's sender reputation or a site's search reputation is problematic. This can be gamed so easily. I could set up 5,000 fake email addresses at gmail, subscribe to my competitor's email newsletter, and then never ever open any email for the next 6 months. Presumably, this would get them blacklisted in Gmail and (possibly) blacklisted and dropped from organic search results as well.

Cue the black market for non-engaging gmail accounts in 3...2...1...

drakaal4• 15 years ago

You assume there aren't easier ways to game Google to de-rank people. Buy popunders on porn sites to your competition.

You can de-rank them, get them kicked out of adsense, and more in a week for under $500. Seen reputation management services do this to get bad reviews to fall in rankings lots of times.

hessam• 15 years ago

It makes a lot of sense to improve the performance of email campaigns, but to link poor email reception to Google Search penalties is highly speculative and misguided.

The site in question was most likely affected by the Panda update which was released (in several iterations) around the same time and looking at the articles on the site I can see why this could've happened.

Matt_Cutts6• 15 years ago

The original blog poster left more details in the comments, which let me get to the bottom of this. If you want to know what really happened, here's my comment with the explanation: http://goo.gl/6A8f9

itrc• 15 years ago

Hi Matt

I am the biggest fan of yours on the earth , What about Google Group emails and spamming ?

joshfraser• 15 years ago

Isn't email tracking usually done using an image beacon and aren't images turned off by default in GMail? It sounds to me like he may have accidentally purged a lot of active readers by putting too much faith in flawed reporting tools.

Sure, you should never send email to anyone who marked you as spam, but deleting people just because they don't have images turned on is probably overkill.

Email Reputation Causes Penalties in Google Search Results

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