mediajunk

Concerns have been raised by webmasters across the world since my first post about the Google Florida Update.

Chief among these are: can a mischievous competitor get you dropped from Google’s search results?

One of the main effects of the Florida update is that sites are now getting penalised on specific keywords/keyphrases.

Let’s say, for example, that I was running a toy shop called www.xmastoys.com .

If a lot of my links contain the text “Christmas toys” (especially if they are on pages that otherwise aren’t about toys), I may find that, post-Florida, my site doesn’t show up anywhere for a search on “Christmas Toys”.

My site may otherwise score just as well as it did pre-Florida on other searches.

What concerns webmasters and SEOs then is: if I haven’t been penalised for the keyphrase “Christmas Toys”, my competitors can easily make me disappear from the results for this search by posting a lot of “bad” links to me. (For example, links from lots of Google-banned porn sites.)

Prior to the Florida update, Google’s policy was understood to be that your site’s listings couldn’t be affected by any action that a competitor might take against you. This no longer seems to be the case.

Webmasters are worried that we are on the brink of a new era of underhand SEO tactics – which is ironic, given that Google’s stated intention with the Florida update (as conveyed by its bulletin board representative, GoogleGuy) was to reduce so-called “blackhat” activities.