Matt Cutts, the big cheese of Google's anti-spam team, has published another seo-insider video on YouTube. In this video, he answers the question why Interflora's penalty was lifted after just 11 days. Does Google have different penalties for different websites ? How was Interflora's website penalized? Earlier in 2013, the website of Interflora (a popular UK flower website) was penalized because the company had bought many backlinks from various newspaper websites. After only 11 days, their website was back in Google's index. Typically most websites need several months to recover from Google penalties. In the YouTube video, Mr. Cutts was asked by another website operator to explain the penalty process applied to the Interflora website : read_more Matt Cutt's generalized explanation Dubiously, Matt Cutts didn't want to talk about specific penalties or companies. In the video, he said that repeat offenders get hit with a stronger penalty than websites that have used spam tools or carpet-backlinking for the first time : "Google tends to look at buying and selling links that pass PageRank as a violation of our guidelines and if we see that happening multiple times, repeated times, then the actions that we take get more and more severe. So we're more willing to take stronger action whenever we see repeated violations." It appears that Interflora was actually a first time offender and that they were not fully aware that the paid links from newspaper websites could cause problems. When Interflora removed the newly purchased links, Google restored the previous rankings of the website. And so what does this mean for your website? If you have received a spam warning message from Google, you should remove all spam elements from your pages and you should try to remove all spammy links that point to your web pages. Interflora's high rankings have been restored because the company already had high rankings before they acquired the paid links. If your website received high rankings because of the paid links before Google detected them, it's likely that your web pages still won't get high rankings when Google lifts the penalty. So if you want your rankings back, Google expects you to take...
