According to my reading of the article, the issue was that Overstock encouraged educational institutions to place certain crafted links on their pages in exchange for discounts. This is obviously a payed linking scheme, which is explicitly forbidden in the Google guidelines. To my understanding it has nothing to do with academic pages discussing GoodRelations of other semantic practices.<br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 19:17, Martin Hepp <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org">martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
Hi Barbara,<br>
<br>
Thanks for the link. As far as I understand, Google did not penalize anybody for linking to Overstock.com item pages via "semantic" links, i.e., in RDF statements. They seem to have filtered out the positive effect of someone from an .edu domain linking to a particular item page.<br>
<br>
So, if someone at Stanford would link from a <a href="http://stanford.edu" target="_blank">stanford.edu</a> page to<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.overstock.com/Electronics/Bell-and-Howell-DV550UW-12MP-Digital-Video-Camera-with-Underwater-Housing/4450313/product.html" target="_blank">www.overstock.com/Electronics/Bell-and-Howell-DV550UW-12MP-Digital-Video-Camera-with-Underwater-Housing/4450313/product.html</a><br>
<br>
and discussing it as an example of GoodRelations usage, Google would no longer count this with the full <a href="http://stanford.edu" target="_blank">stanford.edu</a> page rank. That seems reasonable to me.<br>
<br>
In my opinion, this cannot have a major effect on the 900,000 <a href="http://overstock.com" target="_blank">overstock.com</a> pages in breadth, since academic post will usually mention only 1 - 2 URIs.<br>
<br>
So if this correction is properly implemented by Google, it should only correct the excessive inbound pageranks for 0.0001 % of the item pages.<br>
<br>
And again, the WSJ report is not about "semantic" links in RDF triples, but about a correction method against "social link building" to <a href="http://overstock.com" target="_blank">overstock.com</a> pages from pagerank-strong .edu Web content.<br>
<br>
The bad ranking of some pages reported seems to be the result of Google "overshooting" a bit with their correction factor.<br>
<br>
Best<br>
<font color="#888888">Martin Hepp<br>
</font><div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
<br>
On Feb 24, 2011, at 11:36 AM, Barbara H Starr wrote:<br>
<br>
> Hi All,<br>
><br>
> I would love for you all to read the article below! It is my belief, that colleges and universities have been linked back to Overstock.com as a result of their adoption of goodrelations and rdfa for e-commerce! To hear that tOVerstsock have been penalized for this (backlinks from goodrelations adoption in effect) as a result of unethical back linking is amazing to me! (If you read the article below, it specifically cites back linking from .edu sites as a judgement for downgrading the SEO ranking of the site)<br>
><br>
> I do not see any black hat tactics here! Merely academic references! Would love to hear any thoughts on the matter<br>
><br>
> Here is the link to the article! And FYI, this has serious bottom line impact!<br>
><br>
> The original article and citation against JC Penny was in the NY times.<br>
><br>
> <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704520504576162753779521700.html" target="_blank">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704520504576162753779521700.html</a><br>
><br>
> looking forward to your feedback<br>
><br>
> regards<br>
><br>
> Barbara Starr<br>
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