Google Admits To Penalizing The BBC, But Only Granularly

Mar 18, 2013 - 8:37 am 52 by

BBC LogoFriday we broke the story that the BBC received a Google link notification of unnatural links.

This was a big deal - a huge news organization received a Google notification about bad things happening to their web site. I mean, if you can't trust the BBC from a link quality point of view, who can you trust? (Fox News folks, relax)

So what happened? Google's John Mueller dug into the details and discovered this was a "granular" penalty. John said in the Google Webmaster 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.

So one page on the BBC had unnatural links. Because of that, Google took action on that one individual article. Google did not take action against the rest of the BBC web site.

The thing is, John did not tell Nick which page. So there is a manual penalty on a specific article page and Nick has no clue which page it is. Shouldn't Google tell him which page so he can fix it some how?

Anyway, this is an interesting case of Google penalizing the largest news organization in the world but only one specific page.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: February 21, 2025

Feb 21, 2025 - 10:00 am
Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Ranking Volatility, In-Content Learning, Google AI With Ads, Local & More

Feb 21, 2025 - 8:01 am
Google Ads

Google Response Search Ads (RSAs) Second Headline In Sitelinks & More

Feb 21, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google

Google Hotel Results Tests Book With Official Site Box

Feb 21, 2025 - 7:41 am
Bing Search

Bing Copilot AI Answers Tabbed Carousel Card

Feb 21, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google Ads

Google Ads To Stop Placing Your Ads On Parked Domains By Default

Feb 21, 2025 - 7:21 am
Previous Story: Google Stops Indexing Craigslist; Matt Cutts Fixes