Google Penalized One Article On BBC’s Web Site

Google did end commenting on why the BBC received an unnatural link notification despite offering us a “no comment” on our story this past Friday.
Was the BBC penalized for unnatural links? Was it possible that the world’s largest news organization was not trusted by Google’s algorithms? The answer is, only one article was penalized.
John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland, said in a Google Help thread:

Looking into the details here, what happened was that we found unnatural links to an individual article, and took a granular action based on that. This is not negatively affecting the rest of your website on a whole.

As you can see, Google will penalize a specific webpage, specific section of a website or even the whole site.
In this case, it seems as if Google only took action on a specific article and not the whole website.

Google’s Matt Cutts On Upcoming Penguin, Panda & Link Networks Updates

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts announced new updates with Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithms and new link network targets in 2013. Matt announced this during the SMX West panel, The Search Police.

Significant Penguin Update

Matt said that there will be a large Penguin update in 2013 that he thinks will be one of the more talked about Google algorithm updates this year. Google’s search quality team is working on a major update to the Penguin algorithm, which Cutts called very significant.
The last Penguin update we have on record was Penguin 3 in October 2012. Before that, we had Penguin 2 in May 2012 and the initial release in April.
So, expect a major Penguin release that may send ripples through the SEO industry this year.

A Panda Update Coming This Friday Or Monday

Matt also announced there will be a Panda algorithm update this coming Friday (March 16th) or Monday (March 18th). The last Panda update was version 24 on January 22nd, which is one of the longer spans of time between Panda refreshes we’ve seen in a long time.

Another Link Network Targeted

Matt Cutts confirmed that Google targeted a link network a couple weeks ago and said Google will go after more in 2013. In fact, Matt said that they will release another update in the next week or two that specifically targets another large link network.

Google Penalizes Another Link Network: SAPE Links

The rumors floating around the SEO industry right now is that Google has crushed yet another link network. SAPE links, a link network I honestly never heard of, was the target this time. Any of those using SAPE links were supposedly penalized and downgraded in their rankings over the past 24 hours or so.

We have dozens of threads about downgrades of Google rankings but the black hat SEO forums all seem to point at SAPE Links as the cause.


Black Hat World and Black Hat Group both seem convinced the reason for the downgrade in rankings in Google yesterday was due to having links from SAPE links.

However, others are not sure if it is specific to SAPE or some other link network.

There is clearly something going on, it doesn't seem to be an algorithmic update but it does seem to be a targeted penalty attacking specific link networks and the sites/webmasters that use them.

Here is a list of threads that are complaining about ranking declines at Google Webmaster Help.
A tweet from about a month ago from Google's Matt Cutts kind of supports this. SAPE Links is a Russian link network:



Matt Cutts         @mattcutts

@dannysullivan @seocom just another day at the office for me. :) Okay, gotta look at some really naughty Russian link selling software now.