Halifax Bank Google Penalty
Big brands not immune to Google Penalties anymore
Halifax Bank owned by Lloyds and one of the largest retail banks in the UK has been hit hard with a Penalty and lost 20% of its visibility in Google overnight. While some have suspected Negative-SEO practice again, we can see this was not the case. Once again Google shows it’s superpowers to hurt a business to lose tens of thousands of pounds per day in their never-ending campaign against SEO and unnatural links.
This penalty could probably have been avoided had the bank or their responsible marketing and SEO professionals implemented ongoing link risk management and pro-active disavows as we’ve been recommending for over a year now.
This is the full deep dive case study with 250% more than the preview and contains more details than any other report on the Halifax bank Google penalty. This case study was written by our most recent LRT Certified Professional Bartosz Góralewicz.
- Enjoy & Learn!
Christoph C. Cemper
PS: As usual in our deep-dives we want to give site owners, customers, and interested SEOs, clues on what to look for and how to use LRT to identify link profile risks. We assume Halifax and their team will be actively auditing their backlink profile and perform link cleanups as you read this.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Facts about Halifax
- SEO Spam Detective’s Investigation work
- Halifax’s SEO strategy
- All the black-hat SEO techniques used by Halifax one by one
- Link sources – summary
- Link Detox (DTOX) for Halifax
- Competition
- Summary
CEMPER Power*Trust is now LRT Power*Trust
You may still see CEMPER Power*Trust™, CEMPER Power™ and CEMPER Trust™ on some screenshots in this case study.
In 2015, we renamed these metrics to LRT Power*Trust, LRT Power and LRT Trust to reflect the shortname of LinkResearchTools - which is LRT.
Introduction
Halifax dropped like crazy in the SERPs for SEO tactics that probably date back to 2011 or older. Once again the lack of ongoing link audits and removal of risky links – we call it Link Risk Management – led to a Google Penalty.
– “like a personal injury lawyer at a car crash”.Facts about Halifax
Let’s start with some facts about Halifax for those of you who may have never heard about this huge UK brand.
Halifax is the 4th biggest retail bank in UK. Halifax is owned by the Lloyds Banking group which 43% is government owned.
Finance niche in UK
To Demonstrate how large this financial niche is in the UK, let me show you some facts about banks in UK.
- They employ 0.5 million people
- Banks and financial services contribute £70bn to the UK’s national output (6.8% of GDP)
- Banks and financial services provide 25% of total corporation tax (£8bn) to the UK Gov
- The main retail banks provide over 125m accounts, clear 7bn transactions a year and facilitate 2.3bn cash withdrawals per year from its network of over 30,000 free ATMs
- Banks provide banking services to 95% of the UKs population
- The value of foreign exchange business passed through London every day is £560bn ($1 trillion)
Source - http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/347/uk-economy/top-10-british-banks/
Most Expensive Google Penalty?
I am very deeply engaged in the finance niche since I have many customers in it and I can tell you, it is an extremely lucrative niche. I think that Halifax’s drop might be one of the most expensive SEO failures of recent times.
I’ve included the stats above into this case study to show you how much the finance niche is worth in the UK. Just one day without organic SEO visibility might cost one financial institution tens to hundreds of thousands of pounds per day.
Recent changes in the financial niche
The banking and finance niche in the UK has had problems with affiliate sites basically flooding the SERPs for the most competitive keywords like “payday loans”, etc. before last year’s Google “payday loan” update.
As an interesting fact, Google’s got their own affiliate site now in finance niche. What is most shocking; it is not different than many other affiliate sites penalized for “not providing unique and interesting content”.
https://www.google.co.uk/compare/currentaccount/qs#!profile=ANY_ACCOUNT
I am far from some conspiracy theories, but not many people know that Google is actually an affiliate in a finance niche :).
Negative SEO?
As I mentioned above, before “payday loans” algorithm update, there were many DDOS or negative SEO attacks in finance niche. That’s why after www.halifax.co.uk dropped in Google, many people were suspecting a negative SEO attack.
Was it a negative SEO attack? Let’s take a closer look at Halifax’s link profile.
SEO Spam Detective’s Investigation work
This is the step by step explanation of how I’ve found all the bad links. If you want, you can skip to All the black-hat SEO techniques used by Halifax.
Halifax drops in Google
2014 seems to be the year of big brands and big drops. Google is less tolerant to some of the tricks used by even largest brands. Halifax is a second big drop this year after Expedia.
On 6th February SearchMetrics.com recorded a huge visibility drop for Halifax.co.uk.
As you can see, the visibility drop is really a big one here. Let’s take a look at the loser keywords now.
As we can see, Google hit the site where it really hurts – the short tail money keywords like “loans”. These dropped keywords are actually very expensive and high value. The daily loss for Halifax.co.uk is going to be huge.
What happened before the drop?
Let’s run a Competitive Link Velocity and check if there was any aggressive link building done during the past months.
First, we need Halifax’s competitors to compare the velocity. This way we can be sure, that a spike on the chart is a link building activity, instead of, for example, a seasonal popularity growth that happens in a niche.
Now, let’s start the Link Velocity Tool (CLV) in LinkResearchTools for those domains.
I chose the last 24 months. This way I can clearly see any spikes.
We can clearly see that there was huge velocity growth in December 2013.
As you can see above, there is a spike in December 2013. Almost half a million linking pages but from only 189 domains?
This shows MASSIVE sitewide linking going on.
Different crawlers seem to confirm the spike we saw in CLV.
Similar to CLV – referring domains vs. backlinks ratio shows clearly massive sitewide linking.
Now, we can assume, that Halifax’s ranking drop was somehow connected to the massive sitewide linking we noticed on the charts above.
Who was linking to Halifax.co.uk?
Let’s run a quick backlink analysis with QBL and see if we spot anything interesting there.
Important thing to remember while running QBL now is to uncheck “Skip sitewide links” option.
Those are actually the links we WANT to see. Also, in cases such as this one, I prefer to uncheck “Remove Dropped Links”. I do that for a simple reason; if Halifax.co.uk was penalized, they are losing thousands of pounds each hour. If so, they are deleting the links causing the manual penalty by the thousands per hour probably, to alleviate the situation as fast as possible.
After quick look at the results, there are few things that should grab your attention. Let’s take a look at the screenshot below.
There is an enormous percentage of the “remortgaging your home” keyword in Halifax’s backlink profile.
Let’s create a slice and look closer into that.
After filtering we can clearly see that ALL of those links are coming from www.bankofscotland.co.uk
OK, our analysis is done here. Now all we need to do is open the site and see where the link is placed and if it is natural (I doubt it after seeing the data).
This is what we get after clicking www.bankofscotland.co.uk/HelpCentre/
Now let’s take a look at the code:
This above could clearly explain the Search Quality Team being “upset” with Halifax.co.uk.
But it doesn’t fit with the “looser” keywords we saw in SearchMetrics. Let’s dig a little deeper then.
Sources of “bad links”
“Remortgaging your home” wasn’t the only keyword that caught my attention.
6.9% of keywords with one Anchor Text – “View all our saving accounts”? That is also a little bit suspicious. Again, let’s look into that.
All of the links are do-follow, but there is one more thing that should raise a flag and tell us we are moving in the right direction.
http://www.investinternals.com/2008/02/convert-bad-habit-to-millions.html
After clicking some random sites from the list, I couldn’t find the “live” link anywhere. That tells me that Halifax must be actively deleting the links from those sites.
Of course in cases like this, Google Cache or Wayback Machine is a very useful tool.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5K-pzSQZH18J:www.simplybudgeted.com/category/simplylife/lifestyle/+&cd=1&hl=pl&ct=clnk&gl=pl
As we see in Google Cache, it was a widget filled with links to www.halifax.co.uk
Wow, and that’s a cream filled cookie. Three money keyword links embedded in relevant content.
However, most of the sites I visited live have deleted it already.
Closer look at the Halifax’s widget link campaign
Halifax used not only one, but different widgets targeting different groups of keywords. Actually by looking at their backlink profile, I would say it was Halifax’s main linking strategy.
There were two different kinds of widgets. One which was a smaller version, and a second having more text. From what I see, the “larger” one is now mostly deleted/wiped. The smaller one is still possible to find.
Small widget:
Large widget:
The large widget was probably similar to the one above, but the JavaScript responsible for widget’s look is deleted from hosting server.
By googling the widget’s footprint, we can see the scale of widget backlinks www.halifax.co.uk
https://www.google.co.uk/#q=%22fixed+rate+isa%22+%22maximise+your+tax-free+savings%22
Keep in mind, that most of the links are probably de-indexed by Google by now.
https://www.google.co.uk/#q=%22reach+your+savings+goals+with+our+range+of+savings+accounts.view+all+our+savings%22
That is 37,000 links. It was definitely more than that before they got deleted and some of them de-indexed.
https://www.google.co.uk/#q=%22are+you+making+the+most+of+your+isa+allowance%3F+halifax+offers%22
This one is a high score of 57,100 results/links.
https://www.google.co.uk/#q=%22Get+a+quick+quote+to+see+if+our+personal+loans+could+be+the+answer.%22
Of course, there were a lot more widgets, each targeting specific groups of keywords. More about different widget will be covered later in this case study.
Widget’s impact on Halifax’s visibility drop
Let’s compare SearchMetrics’ Looser Keywords with the ones Halifax used in its widget.
“ISA” and “ISA allowance” drops
And widget you can see below with “ISA” and “isa allowance” keywords.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZSzVPOvHNiMJ:www.boorooandtiggertoo.com/2012/08/warner-bros-got-uv-covered.html+&cd=1&hl=pl&ct=clnk&gl=pl
“Saving accounts” drops
“Savings accounts” visibility drops can be clearly connected with another widget.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:alKGzNG76ccJ:ourlifeinthed.com/how-to-find-the-best-job-opportunities/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk
“Personal loans”, “Loan Calculator” and “Loans”
“Loans” is actually a keyword with huge traffic, huge conversions and huge earnings.
This is probably why there are 2 separate widgets for “loans” related keywords.
But first, let’s see the drop.
“Loans” and “Loan Calculator” dropped around ~40 positions in Google.
That is a clear sign of Manual Penalty for those keywords.
Now, let’s take a quick look at the widgets stuffed with “loans” keywords.
http://web.archive.org/web/20131208144643/http://thecollegeinvestor.com/resources/
Perhaps the most important traffic drop is connected with the small widget. It is an exact match to the “looser” keywords.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2ztmIY8S6fwJ:www.cultofmoney.com/page/2/+&cd=5&hl=pl&ct=clnk&gl=pl
What you do not see in the screenshot is that the sections “Loans” and “Loan Calculator” contain even more text with DO-Follow money keyword links for say “loans”.
You should watch this small video to get an idea of their sneaky tactics.
Halifax’s SEO strategy
After finishing the “preview” deep dive, I couldn’t stop thinking about Halifax’s SEO strategy. I know this niche, usually my customers (banks or financial institutions) make plans not for next few months, but for a few years ahead.
Halifax’s actions must be connected with their marketing strategy or with Lloyds Banking Group strategy.
It might be hard to figure it out now, as they are deleting all the links, widgets etc., but let’s give it a try. We have some clues after all.
More on the “Large” widget
We found some sites with widget still alive. The graphics and Java Script is deleted, but we can track the widget’s hosting.
Now, let’s take a closer look at the HTML code “around” the widget.
So all the graphics and JavaScript code were hosted at http://lbgwidgets.com
I can only guess that LBG stands for Lloyds Bank Group. Now let’s go back to LinkResearchTools and run QBL for http://lbgwidgets.com.
It is important to uncheck “Remove Dropped Links”. Most of the links might be deleted by now, so it is crucial.
As you can clearly see above, there are 6 links from 4 domains only.
All of those links are infographic submissions.
http://infographicjournal.com/buying-a-home-in-7-easy-steps/
The image is deleted from hosting (it was probably wiped clean after the penalty), but after some Googling, I’ve found this missing infographic on Pinterest.
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/181762534933870573/
I am inserting a cropped image, as it is too large to be fully included in the case study.
Now, most of you would probably think – infographics filled with keywords – that might also be the reason for the Manual Penalty from Google. Personally - I don’t think so. Of course it is clearly not white hat SEO, but Google usually starts penalizing for “grey hat” techniques after a video “warning” from Matt Cutts.
Halifax posted those infographics roughly a year before the Matt’s video, so it may or may not be the reason for the penalty.
But let’s go back to that widget domain we found.
We can easily connect it to infographic submissions, but I would still search a little bit deeper. I already checked that http://lbgwidgets.com/robots.txtis blocking Google and other bots from indexing, but we all know that Google bots don't always obey robots.txt. There is only one good way to make sure, by using Google and inserting the “Site:” command for it.
Lloyds involved in widget link campaign too
Now a quick look at the search results.
Remember my “suspicion” that LBGwidgets.com stands for Lloyd Bank Group? I think I might be right about this one.
Screenshot above shows clearly that Lloyds bank is also using the widgets for increasing their SEO visibility.
I checked and Lloyds has few domains connected to this corporation. We need to figure out which one had widget backlinks.
Unfortunately after a QBL and going through many of the backlinks, I didn’t manage to find the “live” or cached widget. I also didn’t find too many ISA related keywords to Lloyds bank. Maybe the Lloyds widget was never fully implemented?
Finally after few hours of googling, I did manage to find a screenshot of lbgwidgets.com, showing all the widgets from Halifax and Lloyds! BINGO!
This domain was blocked from indexing, so it is a great luck that archive.is somehow indexed and cached lbgwidgets.com.
Now how about this menu of widgets?
http://archive.is/3i7YN
This is a very interesting screenshot - dated May 2013. I suppose that site and data have been wiped after Halifax received a manual penalty from Google.
We can clearly see full “selection” of widgets. For Lloyds and for Halifax. That is a great find! We can easily connect the penalized keywords with a widget “responsible” for the drop.
Now let’s look closer at a “small” widget.
More on the “Small” widget
Now, similar as with the “large widget” I need to check the code and find the hosting of the widget.
The widget is hosted at the subdomain - http://test.mecseo.com
We can clearly see the code and graphics for the widget. Unfortunately, test.mecseo.com has no backlinks and WHOIS is blocked.
Similar with reverse IP – no results.
Fortunately, Jonathan Jones commented on our preview Case Study with something I found quite interesting.
Before we go through the quoted above case study, there is one clear connection.
http://www.mecglobal.co.uk and test.mecseo.com
That shows that most probably MECGlobal agency has created this SEO widget.
Now, let’s take a closer look at the link we got from Jonathan http://vlexo.net/.
MEC Global Case Study on SEO Widget success
It is a case study by MEC Global, describing in-detail their SEO campaign for www.halifax.co.uk.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130428023317/http://www.mecglobal.co.uk/our-work/case-studies/halifax-isas-search
As you can see, the whole thing “started” with Lloyds Banking Group willing to make www.halifax.co.uk most visible site online.
You can even see the selection of keywords like “ISAS” and “cash ISAS”. Exactly the ones showing up on the widgets and recent drops.
As you can see above, it was all a planned action targeted towards reaching top positions in Google before Tax Year End.
How were they planning to achieve such a result in a short period of time?
So, as we see, there is another side to the “story”. Halifax, owned by Lloyds Banking Group, was “pushed” to Google's top 10 using “Saving Calculator Widget” as the part of their “content marketing” approach.
Results were really outstanding.
- 244% higher visitor volume (from organic search).
- Sales percentage increase was in alignment (so around 250%) with visitor increase.
- Halifax is most visible for ISA related searches.
Those numbers above are impressive in every niche, but what has to be said here, 250% sales increase in finance industry –those are hundreds of thousands of Pounds every month. They sure got some “savings” for the penalty period.
Stock prices and SEO rankings co-relate
Now, let’s take a quick look at Lloyds Banking Group earnings during that time.
If my calculations are right, 6 months before the Tax Year End (5th April 2013), then it could mean that campaign started in October 2012. Let’s compare this hypothesis with Lloyds Banking Group's stock prices.
There are many factors influencing Lloyds Banking Group's stock price, and I am far from claiming that the widgets are the “causation”, but there sure is an interesting correlation between those two.
All the black-hat SEO techniques used by Halifax one by one
1. SEO widgets
Halifax’s biggest sin. It probably got them in the situation they are experiencing right now.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:alKGzNG76ccJ:ourlifeinthed.com/how-to-find-the-best-job-opportunities/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2ztmIY8S6fwJ:www.cultofmoney.com/page/2/+&cd=5&hl=pl&ct=clnk&gl=pl
What you do not see in the screenshot is that the sections “Loans” and “Loan Calculator” contain even more text with DO-Follow money keyword links for say “loans”.
http://www.globaltravelblog.co.uk/page/4
2. Link Networks used by Halifax
Yakezie Link Network
Guest blogging in Yakezie network
While only doing a brief backlink check, I’ve found many links from blogs in the Yakezie network (penalized by Google a while back for selling links).
Those links may also be connected to the recent drop.
http://www.financiallypoor.com/debt-management/what-is-a-car-loan-calculator/
Widgets/link boxes in Yakezie network
http://www.themoneyprinciple.co.uk/savings-calculator-check-out-this-nifty-pf-tool/
SEO directories
http://www.01webdirectory.com/home_property_insurance.htm
http://directory.internetbusiness.co.uk/dir/207/175.php
3. Advertorials
Paid guest blogging, usually on low quality blogs, with in-context keywords.
http://thediscoveryblog.com/how-to-finance-a-diy-project/
http://blog.thebigpropertylist.co.uk/how-to-save-up-for-a-deposit-for-a-house
Posts with money keywords on a low quality, multi-subject sites. Exactly the kind of guest blogging that Matt Cutts is recently fighting.
4. Scaled infographics submissions
Infographic submissions in large scale: Most of the infographics have money-keywords “stuffed” into text above or below infographic.
http://infographicjournal.com/buying-a-home-in-7-easy-steps/
5. Interlinking between partner sites (in Lloyds Banking Group)
Massive scale, keyword – rich site wide links from other banks in Lloyds Banking Group.
http://www.bankofscotland.co.uk/HelpCentre/
Link sources – summary
Each of linking “strategy” listed above can get Halifax a manual penalty from Google Search Quality Team. From what I saw in SearchMetrics, ww.halifax.co.uk probably got penalized only for using the SEO widgets.
One thing for sure, the Halifax’s SEO team have their hands full. From what I saw in this Case Study, Google probably won’t let go easily. As one ex-Googler said to me once – they have got one “golden rule” in the Search Quality Team – “You crapped all around the web –now you have to clean it up”. I think this quote shows exactly the actual “status” of Halifax’s SEO team…. their hands full, cleaning up … well you know what.
Link Detox (DTOX) for Halifax
Now, let’s take a look at www.halifax.co.uk backlink DTOX.
In a preview version of this Case study we had a Link Detox Risk of 1208! The score was based “only” on a 160,000 backlinks.
With this DTOX, we had a little bit more time and we processed more than 3 million links, classifying 100% of their keywords, and re-processing we got our Link Detox Risk of 1399!
That’s even worse and a nasty result and very certainly reason to act – for both, Google as well as the Halifax marketing teams!
As you see above, www.halifax.co.uk has almost a quarter of their links (22.4%) with a Deadly Risk.
This is a crazy amount of high risk links!
High Risk Money Anchor Text links
As we can see in the keyword cloud colored by risk (the more red, the more dangerous the link) especially the money keyword links coming from high risk link pages, while some branded keyword phrases came from moderate risk sources.
Competition
As the first step I want to see how Halifax’s link profile looks comparing to their competitors.
Let’s run Competitive Landscape Analysis (CLA) from LinkResearchTools.
CLA
I choose “Detail analysis” to pick the data I would like to analyze.
After doing a complete analysis of the backlinks first, now I can pick the metrics, I think are going to be most interesting.
Now we run the report and classify the keywords. With sites that large, it might take a few hours.
It is best to get at least 80% keywords classified to get the good results.
After keyword classification, let’s take a look at the competition.
I marked “strong” places on the chart with red arrows. These are the spikes of pretty powerful links, comparing to competition. Also there are few week links (2% for Halifax, comparing to 23% for Total Average for competitors) – I marked this with a rectangle.
While looking at only LRT Power*Trust™ metric, www.halifax.co.uk has a lot of powerful links and by looking at the chart above, should be outranking competition pretty well in Google with such link profile.
Now let’s take a look at LRT Trust™.
Again, pretty large spike – 47% of LRT Trust™ links, comparing to 27% for competition Total Average.
Much less Money keywords than competition. Halifax’s has got a lot of “compound” links. This also might be caused, due to the extreme sitewide linking (from widgets for example). I didn’t want to include all the sitewide links for Halifax into report, as It would just mess up the results. There was a sitewide filter set up for max 5 links per domain.
Follow vs No Follow ratio is identical as Top 3 average.
CLA summary
Halifax’s link profile is close to average in the niche. Only factors “sticking out” are:
- Money vs Brand vs Compound vs Others ratio
- LRT Power*Trust™
- LRT Trust™
By looking at ONLY the metrics above, Halifax.co.uk has a powerful linking profile. It was probably their competitor’s worst nightmare.
Summary
It is clear that Halifax’s SEO strategy was “made to win”. They had a lot of success with it. I would say it was a huge challenge, it was close to impossible to over rank it with white hat SEO.
When we look at the deleted MEC case study we have clear confirmation that the widgets were all strategy. And to be honest at the time that was planned and implemented it was state-of-the art or at least not as dangerous as today. This is yet another example why ongoing link audits and link risk management should be on top of every executive’s agenda. If you’re responsible for your companies marketing and you don’t know the Link Detox Risk scores of your backlink profiles, you’re definitely risking your job or business.
What is interesting is that the Google Search Quality Team left many of the black hat techniques un-penalized for big brands for a long time and now seems to crack down on it.
There is one “quote” that perfectly sum’s up this case study.
No matter what Google says – “Cash flow is the king!”
PS: the high Link Detox Risk of 1300ish would make Halifax a great candidate for a Penguin victim. Was this maybe a new “secret” Penguin update? We have seen A LOT of crazy drops on Jan 16 and Jan 31 so the question remains – manual or algorithmic?
Has the Google Penguin algorithm finally switched to an ever-penguin that hands out algorithmic penalties on an ongoing basis or was this a manual penalty?
What do you think?
This case study was written by Bartosz Góralewicz, SEO Consultant, Online Marketing Specialist, and proud user of LinkResearchTools and Link Detox.
A word from Christoph C. Cemper
This analysis was conducted and written by our LRT Certified Professional, Bartosz Góralewicz.
Bartosz showed proficiency in doing a SEO link audit on Halifax's penalized SEO strategies. I am thrilled by the detail and structure he continues to display in his case studies. Already a Certfied LRT Professional, Bartosz Góralewicz publishes his 2nd case-study and takes the next step toward becoming a LRT Certified Xpert.
Our goal is to provide our user community and clients with quality service and knowledge. Our LRT Certified Professionals and Xperts are key to achieving this goal.
I look forward to his future work, and personally recommend Bartosz Góralewicz to work with you, whenever you get the opportunity!
68 Comments
this tools are so good, but i can use for sapanis site and yu have some spanish tutorial?
Link Research Tools (LRT) and Link Detox (DTOX) work perfect in spanish and many other languages of the 214 countries we have clients in.
We currently do not have a spanish tutorial tough.
Best, Christoph
thanks, i will try
Great case study – very surprising to see a multi billion dollar brand employing fairly low end link buding techniques. Surely it would be worth spending $100k sponsoring high end financial sites and brands, he risk is too high other wise…
Yes it really appears someone tried to save some money, but on the other hand keep in mind that these tactics worked for many years. It’s only the lack of risk management and removal of too risky tactics that killed their traffic now.
Nice one Bartosz! What stuns me is that the Detox score of 1208 is pretty hideous, but recently I have done some Detoxes with scores of over 4000!! Were these major businesses? Not really… one was selling organic skin care products in Sweden another was a Southern France Real Estate website, nothing like Halifax. I’m from the UK so I am fully aware of the hugeness of the Halifax. Presumably the difference is that a massive household name will have a lot of history and strong links anyway.
My guess is that this is an algorithmic penalty – that would be consistent with the algorithmic disasters I have seen in the last few months.
a Link Detox Risk of 4000 or higher is a pretty good sign of almost only cheap and spammy link building and I assume they were all hit by one of the recent Penguin updates.
Christoph
A very nice presentation of what would appear to be corporate seppuku. Thanks for putting so much effort into it so you could share it with us.
Doc, this Weekend-edition is just the preview – watchout for the full edition next week!
Well if this was an algorithmic penguin that means the disavow tool does not cure a penguin algorithmic penalty because I disavowed 90% of 2 domains links at the domain level months ago and the few punished pages that were pushed back far beyond natural rank positions have yet to return when the exact same keyword with a different location attached is much closer to the first pages ! So im hoping it was manual.
Baruch Labunski what are these other tools that send alerts of links to mobiles are they free? 🙂
[took that comment spam out, nice try ~christoph]
Dean just because you say you disavowed doesn’t mean that was enough. Maybe you still have poor links in the profile?
Also – did you Link Detox Boost your disavow? If not, how long have you been waiting?
RT @lnkresearchtool: Halifax Bank Google SEO Penalty – Deep Dive http://t.co/DsX0zJ5joZ
testing
Their media agency also very recently removed a case study they had up on their website. I’ve managed to retrieve it with the Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130428023317/http://www.mecglobal.co.uk/our-work/case-studies/halifax-isas-search
But from the looks of this, it seems this all started (with the widgets) in 2011/12.
They apparently had a 200% increase in traffic through using widgets.
Thanks Jonathan, that’s an interesting one.
Will look into this further with Bart!
~Christoph
Thanks for the link very interesting.
I have seen that widget everywhere, I guess it was just a matter of time until they got penalized.
I think with a high profile company like this it was probably manually issued, but I also think the algorithm has switched to an ever penguin.
Question is how quick will the recovery be, will it just be a case of publicly apologising and removing links then within a few weeks seeing a recovery?
This seems to be what separates big brands from smaller sites.
But I guess for search quality it would make sense for Halifax to quickly rank well again.
Thanks for the heads up. Included your comment in the final version. Great stuff Jonathan!
RT @Modestos_: Big brands not immune to Google Penalties: Halifax Bank Google Penalty Case Study http://t.co/4WTMMuc8yV via @cemper
It seems G is raking the ground for a massive cull of brands and websites. Don´t know why the are taking the trouble of justify themselves. It´s clear that all is about greed. They ´d want all brands to pay for appearing in SERPS, and they can do it whenever they want. We´ll see it in time.
Google penaliza 4o maior banco de UK http://t.co/1bbsHdS4OH e 1 agencia e todos seus clientes na Alemanha http://t.co/x8gAHxbpJa
You probably heard about Halifax Bank website penalised by Google. Check this deep analysis by @bart_goralewicz http://t.co/xqlP8LCvr1 #SEO
Halifax Bank: Big Brands not Immune to Google SEO Penalty – a Deep Dive http://t.co/bO9JKMngr1 via @cemper
Halifax Bank: Big Brands not Immune to Google SEO Penalty – a Deep Dive http://t.co/CrXs7Gziu9 via @cemper
Halifax Bank: Big Brands not Immune to Google SEO Penalty – a Deep Dive http://t.co/DsGxoKiVME via @cemper
RT @JoaoPdaCosta: Halifax Bank: Big Brands not Immune to Google SEO Penalty – a Deep Dive http://t.co/DsGxoKiVME via @cemper
Halifax hit hard by Google unnatural link penalty – full low-down on what and why by @lnkresearchtool : http://t.co/TndfAcfZIP
Admittedly i have read this very quickly, but I see no mention of “native advertising linking” which google have mentioned recently as being something they are looking at – i.e. having many sites under the same ownership and linking between them without declaring them as advertisements or No Follow tagging.
Given Bank of Scotland has all those links pointing at the Halifax site – is the native advertising side of things taken into account here too?
Killer analysis – thank you!
Very surprised to see such poor practices in place – especially when we’re looking at a government sub’d bank. I’m even more surprised to see the recency of the shady activity – this kind of thing has not been cool for a long time. Why? I mean they have a budget for TV advertising. It makes no sense!
This proves two things to me though. One – links are very much STILL Google’s primary vehicle. And two – good (and by that I mean genuine) links are the only way forward!
Halifax Bank: Big Brands not Immune to Google SEO Penalty – a Deep Dive http://t.co/khwZst50U4 via @cemper
“Halifax Bank Google Penalty” http://t.co/typLbGdoH3
Finally live – my most in-detail Case Study http://t.co/V8QeunLqhz Google going after big brands! This time – Halifax #SEO
Thank you Bartosz for the update/conclusion of this Halifax disaster! I’m glad I sold my Halifax shares shortly after getting them 🙂
One thing I thought is that when you did the CLA report comparethemarket.com was already in there, which we now know has been hit by Penguin. So how can we stop accidently including already penalised competitors here?
Halifax Bank: Big Brands not Immune to Google SEO Penalty – a Deep Dive [full +250% edition] http://t.co/LMc6Xs7cUQ via @cemper
I think with all the hype in regard to big brands Google has to act on some of the bigger brands that do flout the laws, on this occasion The Halifax are truly in breach of bad practices, it would be nice to see what they do and how fast they recover in this instance.
Still goes to show that links rule, someone above mentioned that a detox score of 1399 is hideous, but with that amount of incoming links and no real link management it could have been a lot worse and as mentioned so easy to manage
Great post Bartosz really enjoyed the case study
Very good analysis, the thing is right at the end you mention “Black hat tactics” to be honest linking to partner sites and using some old school SEO directories should not be classed as black hat. That should be classed as low quality link building.
It is worrying that such a large brand would go and invest in a whole selection of these low quality tactics. I guess they trusted the agency and wanted more and more growth and were willing to let things slide.
James, I agree,
in fact I suspect it was the typical case of “Management not knowing about having to do link risk management” as suggested in my Forbes article
http://www.forbes.com/sites/denispinsky/2014/02/11/negative-seo/
Best
Christoph
FYI: the reason why you may have not been able to find a cached image for Lloyds is because LloydsBank.com was LloydsTSB.com before.
Here’s an example of a LloydsTSB widget:
http://web.archive.org/web/20131226120405/http://plantingmoneyseeds.com/
If you paste this URL into MajesticSEO:
http://www.lloydstsb.com/savings/cash_isa.asp
You will find an entire list of backlinks with the following anchor text, embedded within widgets:
“cash isa in the 2012/2013 tax year.”
Most of these have been cleaned up however – similar to how they’ve cleaned up the widgets for Halifax. 😉
I suppose as they hosted the images + css, the widgets no longer look like widgets anymore. But you can definitely see that both banks engaged in this practice.
Super interesante el caso de estudio de HALIFAX. Lo que funcionó por años ahora ya no. http://t.co/AjtVrsgtdW
Great article, just getting started reading . How can you tell that Barclays listing is a google affiliate page?
Halifax Bank Google SEO Penalty – Deep Dive: Halifax Bank is the most recent popular brand dropping with … http://t.co/f0mDJ4JQ8x #seo
Halifax Bank: Big Brands not Immune to Google SEO Penalty – a Deep Dive [full +250% edition] http://t.co/w5W4nekcwC via @cemper
Very interesting case study. It shows that how large brands also involve to get the higher ranking anf follow the SEO grey hat technique. Thanks for sharing.
Halifax Bank: Big Brands not Immune to Google SEO Penalty – a Deep Dive [full +250% edition] http://t.co/5bNnnjWIF9 via @cemper
Halifax Bank: Big Brands not Immune to Google SEO Penalty – a Deep Dive http://t.co/hFUImlhKAY via @Cemper& @bart_goralewicz
What I would really like to see is some analysis of an existing website that hasn’t been penalized, it would be easy, just pick any of the top 5 in any competitive [finance] vertical.
What do you think you’d see? Yup EVERYONE with a commercial interest is doing exactly the same techniques, agree these may be more blatant but no-one has achieved their rank through these ‘white hat’ techniques that Google talks of.
If Google really want to clean up the index penalize everyone who breaks the rules not just use a few as examples as scare tactics. If they did it would reveal two things 1) no big brands left in their index 2) their algo is very easily manipulated.
How do you think their share price would fair after those revelations?
Google should have attacked from the top in the first place, rather than allowing so many smaller casualties of Penguin. If big brands got hit early on, it would have sent a clear message and the ‘clean up job’ Google want so much would be far more advanced by now.
However, this poses the question: what exactly is it that Google is punishing here? (apart from the obvious, I mean!) These (Lloyds, Expedia) are huge brands, employing 100s/1000s of people (real people with families and stuff), offering genuine services and contributing to society and the economy. I’m not defending them, but we’re not talking about a bedroom affiliate gaming the system and keeping all the spoils. Innocent people could lose their jobs if Lloyds/Expedia decide to make cutbacks.
And, ever Penguin is potentially the most dangerous thing happening. An algorithmic law-enforcement system! Again, what is being punished? There’s a hell of a lot of collateral damage while Google tweak their monster.
Well put Matt!
I think what Google aims for is wake up CEOs and CMOs that they are very serious about enforcing their webmaster guidelines. They let it slip for way too long and I think Google got more drastic because nobody cared about their guidelines for over a decade.
Things have changed and C-levels need to check their Link Detox Risk score as KPI on a weekly basis as suggested here
http://www.forbes.com/sites/denispinsky/2014/02/11/negative-seo/
Top case study of how illicit linking strategies are now being hammered by Google. http://t.co/DxJk8MDQWF via @cemper
Really in-depth analysis of Halifax’s Google penalty… naughty bankers! http://t.co/apL6u3M7zf
Awesome case study!
I’ve learned a lot again from the experts!
Thanks Jerome
another great case study from linkresearchtool.com!
Thanks Jerome!
RT @Timothy_Hughes: Halifax Bank: Big Brands not Immune to Google SEO Penalty – a Deep Dive [full +250% edition] http://t.co/CVop8ineWX via…
Christoph – great info!
Question about the Toxic Link Report: I have a client who has a really high initial score – 4686. However, when I classify the anchor text, it drops significantly. This doesn’t make sense to me. It implies that you can get backlinks from bad sites if you use your brand, but not if you use money keywords?
Also, he only has about 300 links. I know of a cleanup service that costs $3000 that seems to be quite reputable, and makes sense for sites with 2000+ bad links. However, I’m wondering if some of your trained folks do cleanup of “smaller messes” for a reasonable price?
Do you have a referral list for cleanup projects?
Thanks.
Becky,
in fact if you have less than 80% KW classified four rules do not work at all
also – YES – brand keywords are less dangerous on some sites than money keywords.
TL:DR follow the MUST-DO steps to get a precise result, as we recommend or even warn in the application
http://help.linkdetox.com/m/link-detox-step-by-step-guide/c/58699
Best, Christoph
RE: Cleanup Projects yes, please send all details to helpdesk and we’ll gladly connect you with an appropriate consultant
RT @channel_digital: More high profile SEO penalties, this time Halifax; http://t.co/sGBPyqPw21. See our blog on this trend
I’m looking forward to the day when we look back att all of this link hoopla and laugh about how Google made all the SEO’s spend a giant chunk of their time dealing with links before they finally came up with a way to make their search engine algorithm so heavily weighted on links and anchor text keywords.
Great study, and in depth as usual! I look forward to seeing how long it takes for them to recover. Luck for them that widgets can be taken down (or links in the widget can be No Followed) by the owner and basically make all the “bad” links go away in one shot or neuter them through nofollow. Good news for them because it looks like that’s got a lot more of a mess to clean up as well.
Matt, I don’t think that they can remotely control the widgets. They can only remove the Javascript or PNG/JPG image hosted on their servers.
Halifax Bank: Big Brands not Immune to Google SEO Penalty – a Deep Dive [full +250% edition] http://t.co/Jc1zSuT0Jj via @cemper
Halifax Bank: Big Brands not Immune to Google SEO Penalty – a Deep Dive [full +250% edition] http://t.co/FfF2eKA4fX via @cemper
Halifax Bank: Big Brands not Immune to Google SEO Penalty – a Deep Dive [full +250% edition] http://t.co/t6wfGqE08p via @cemper
Great article. Thank you again.
RT @cemper: Halifax bank is the next big player hit by Google’s spam team. Read full Penalty Study #SEO http://t.co/p5oMpJ5Jok http://t.co/…
Spectacular analysis.
Impressive the list of black hat techs used.
Full extensive analysis of Halifax bank penalty live now #SEO http://t.co/t5u7MtcAhr http://t.co/NEXwjZKtHb
RT @cemper: Full extensive analysis of Halifax bank penalty live now #SEO http://t.co/t5u7MtcAhr http://t.co/NEXwjZKtHb