Comments on: Google penalises Overstock.com for offering discounts in return for links

By: Perfect Bound Books

Perfect Bound Books — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 11:05:22 +0000

I think this is obvious! It’s a clever strategy but was always going to be caught out.

By: Ewan Kennedy

Ewan Kennedy — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 09:51:50 +0000

I agree with Richard. There’s nothing wrong with joint marketing but it matters what the terms of that co-operation are and how it manifests itself which in this case was clearly a little too much for G to swallow.

By: russ

russ — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 14:41:03 +0000

Competitors are so cut throat! Reporting them to Google.. give me a break.

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 11:19:57 +0000

Lots of people up there saying its ok to leverage existing customers in your marketing efforts. I agree but the point is that that’s not the problem here. Google guidelines say to do things for customers, not for search engines. Does anyone really think that the structure of those links is ideal for customers or is aimed at anything other than artificially increasing overstock’s ranking for certain terms that these customers would not have natirally linked to?

A simple link to overstock with the domain name as the anchor text would have been fine but from a Google guidelines point of view these links are black hat all the way and unquestionably deserved to be penalised.

By: SofaBlogger

SofaBlogger — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 10:28:09 +0000

Strong action from Google here, business owners need to take note and ensure their compliance – even if it Google does seem rather overbearing at times!

By: Mr. SEO Company

Mr. SEO Company — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 21:53:00 +0000

JCPennys, now overstock. Unreal. Wow would like to know who blew the whistle on this one. Must have been a competitor who cant keep up when they are basically offering discounts for links.

My issue is, where does google stop the penalizing? Do they have people sitting there manually reviewing websites? It’s impossible to create the links google is looking for these days.

Someone, please have google post some real guidelines.

By: Angela

Angela — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:42:50 +0000

This is bad practice. It’s the same as buying links. They should have kept it more secret, it’s a smart plan, but not something that you want Google to know about.

By: David

David — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 10:18:54 +0000

Glad to hear that you and people in the comments thinks there must be more to this story. I originally thought it very strange the first time I heard about it as well.

By: Dixon Jones

Dixon Jones — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 16:11:58 +0000

I can quite easily see there must be more to it than this, just from the backlink history graph: which suggests on that their rate of link discovery went from 2,000 new referring domains a month to 6,000 new referring domains a month in September and October. I guess that it wouldn’t take a genius to delve into some of those links to see what happened. (But for me life’s too short… it;s just good to know that it wasn’t JUST because they offered 10% off.)

By: Mook

Mook — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 15:05:25 +0000

IMHO, penalization easons are to simply find on backlink profile of several big pages of overstock.com :

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.overstock.com%252FClothing%252DShoes%252FHandbags%252FFaux%252DLeather%252C%252Fhandbag%252Dmaterial%252C%252F111%252Fdept.html/a!links!!filter!all!!source!external!!target!page