
Email Reputation Causes Penalties in Google Search Results - joahua
http://www.lockergnome.com/web/2011/05/29/email-reputation-causes-penalties-in-google-search-results/
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Matt_Cutts
I left a "this isn't true" comment on the original thread but I think the
comment will need moderator approval.

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jakeludington
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
> 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.

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kmort
"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)?

~~~
jakeludington
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
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.

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bigiain
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
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.

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jeffreyrusso
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.

~~~
itswindy
>> "without causing significant collateral damage?"

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

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kanetrain
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...

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drakaal
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.

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Matt_Cutts
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>

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joshfraser
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.

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hessam
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.

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itrc
Hi Matt

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

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joahua
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...](http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/3486/do-email-newsletters-
affect-google-page-ranking/)

~~~
ktsmith
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.

~~~
joahua
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?

