Did you see Search Engine Watch remove links to sources on an article about websites scared of outbound links?

[JimmyPage]

I saw this over on reddit and was curious if anyone else saw this article and noticed the same thing?

http://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comments/38jgro/sew_quotes_me_and_others_on_a_topic_about_sites/

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/opinion/2411268/the-collateral-damage-of-google-s-link-policy

The irony here is pretty great.  Thoughts on this?

[MarieHaynes]

SEW is under new ownership. I submitted a post a couple of weeks ago for my monthly column and the majority of the links in my post were nofollowed by SEW.  I wrote to the new editor to ask why and they reviewed the links and decided the the one that I had included that linked to my own site did contribute to the conversation well, so they removed the nofollow.  I had also mentioned Alan Bleiweiss in my article and out of courtesy, linked to his site.  (It bugs me when people mention someone and then link to their Twitter profile...if they're good enough to mention, why not give them a link?)  They would not remove the nofollow on that link.

I think that publications like Search Engine Watch, Moz and other high quality sites that accept user generated content have to be really careful about how they link out. Personally, if SEW told me that all of my links would now be nofollowed, I'd likely keep publishing there as I do get business as a result of my articles.  But, I am guessing that there are quite a few authors that would stop submitting articles to them.

I think this is a case where a few bad apples spoil the lot. I bet you the new editors reviewed some article submissions and saw that people were using SEW as a platform to link out. If SEW got an outbound link penalty that would not be good...so they might have gone a little over to the side of caution in making nofollow decisions.  With that said, it looks like they have now edited the article you quoted to go ahead and allow followed links.  I also checked a few other articles and didn't see any excessive nofollowing so maybe they've loosened up a little.

[MattAntonino]

Yeah, I saw this - it's a bit ... sad and ironic that SEW would say Google's link policy was "doing damage" and then say "we can't link to you because of our company policy about links."

SE Watch was most definitely irony-impaired on this one.

[gazzerman1]

I asked John Mueller at Google a while ago about a news article my company wrote, should my links be dofollow or nofollow, he replied if they have been requested or in exchange for something then it should be nofollow. WHAT! Its a news article that was 100% researched by our team and nobody we link to would even know about it until the article came out and EVEN if they did how the hell would they even know unless there was some sort of visual exchange in someway! I didn't UNDERSTAND the response then and I still DON'T now. If this is a their response and I know 100% that we did our own research how can I trust that anyone looking at the news article from Google will see it the same way and if not then say its seems like someone would have paid for that so we are going to punish you for it. SO despite the article not having any influence or paid links or anything of that sort I still decided to nofollow the links. Google screwed me before on false pretenses and I am sure they will do it again. Mathematically it all leads back to Adwords in some way or another.

Google's flaw has always been the same, don't reveal anything and wait for the spammers who are actively looking for ranking factors to find them way before legit businesses understand them, by this time its exploited by everyone and the cycle starts again!

If ranking factors are a sign of what Google thinks a Good company should demonstrate then why the hell don't they tell people. This way legit business owners will rank up top for their services and be competing with others in their industry instead of competing with spammers and affiliate sites that only exists because of the reasons mentioned in the paragraph above.

Sick of this crap from Google. Same cycle for 15+ years. When will they learn.

They WILL NOT be able to build an algo/system that simply responds to genuine sites. So they might as well train business how to market themselves better. The better the real companies do the harder it will be for blackhat SEO's to enter the market.

They also need to respond immediately to spam issues not wait 6 months to factor them into a new algo. Nip the churn and burns in the bud and they will die a quick death forever!

How can so many bright minds at Google produce such poor decisions. They never think of the consequences of their actions.

Their thoughtless actions and poor response times have led to an astonishing amount of damage.

Forums have been trashed because of link profile building, Google should have discounted that immediately. It would have saved hundreds of thousands of site owners agony and in some cases irreversible damage. The success of this led to people in Asia being hired to decipher captcha codes every few seconds leading people to KILL themselves because of their jobs.

Google has a strong part to play in their DEATHS! This is just the tip of the iceberg.

YES you can't blame a gun maker for a gun owners actions but you can blame them for irresponsible distribution of those guns or poor reactions to issues with those guns. Same thing applies to links and the also to content for Google. The amount of spun garbage out there because Google desires content amounts to unfathomable amounts of garbage content flooding the web. Think of the webservers holding all this garbage and everything surrounding it. The global impact alone of all the energy needed for every aspect of that content, from being crawled and indexed, space required, loading of the content X billions of pages its shocking and probably has a notable impact on climate change.

A company this size needs to take better care before they make ANY decisions.