As promised, Google has taken manual action to penalize link networks in Italy and Spain.
It was just four days ago that Google warned webmasters in those two countries about its rules on paid links and willingness to take action against websites that violate those rules.
The penalties were announced separately on Friday by Google employees outside the U.S., and later retweeted by Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team.
First up was Giacomo Gnecchi, a member of Google’s search quality team based in Dublin, who tweeted the news (in Italian) about the Italian link network penalty:
The Babelfish.com translation of that seems to me to be a little stronger than what Google Translate offers. Here’s what Babelfish says:
Next up was Javier Perez, another Dublin-based Googler, who tweeted in Spanish about the penalty that hit a Spanish link network:
Neither Google nor Babelfish gives a great word-for-word translation, but here’s what Babelfish says:
Late Friday, Cutts offered his own translation of the overall message of both tweets:
These are just the latest two in a series of actions that Google has been taking worldwide against sites that it says are violating its guidelines about paid links. You can see more of those from our archives in the Related Entries links below.
It may not be another link network getting penalized next. At our SMX West conference on Thursday, Cutts warned that a “well known guest blog network” will be penalized next week.
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