<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:tahoma,new york,times,serif;font-size:10pt"><div>I can verify that Google's penalty against Overstock is unrelated to its use of GoodRelations.<br><br>Overstock was penalized for its purchasing of links (and, apparently, another violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines that has yet not been disclosed, but is according to sources another standard and established spamming technique).<br><br>That the links in question were chiefly from .edu sites (particularly effective in passing PageRank to a target site) is interesting but irrelevant. Google's Webmaster Guidelines forbid the selling or purchasing of links to pass PageRank, regardless of source.<br><br>Just for clarification, Martin, while only 0.0001% may have been targets of purchased links, Google's penalties for such violations (if and when detected) tend to be meted out at a section,
subdomain or domain level: when discovered buying links, Google depresses rankings at a broader level than that of the relevant pages. This is not an "overshooting" by Google - think of this a punishment rather than a "correction." In extreme cases of Guidelines violations Google may remove a site from its index altogether. However, again, any rankings drop you may observe for any Overstock page is unrelated to it's use of RDF triples or GoodRelations.<br><br>Further reading:<br><span><a target="_blank" href="http://searchengineland.com/googles-action-against-link-schemes-continues-overstock-com-and-forbes-com-latest-casualities-conductor-exits-business-65926">http://searchengineland.com/googles-action-against-link-schemes-continues-overstock-com-and-forbes-com-latest-casualities-conductor-exits-business-65926</a></span><br><span><a target="_blank"
href="http://www.seroundtable.com/overstock-google-penalty-13004.html">http://www.seroundtable.com/overstock-google-penalty-13004.html</a></span><br><br>In a related note, I have discussed with colleagues in both the SEO and semantic web fields the possibility of structured data being leveraged for spam, but as far as I know it hasn't happened yet:<br><span><a target="_blank" href="http://www.seoskeptic.com/open-linked-data-discovery-proof-and-trust/">http://www.seoskeptic.com/open-linked-data-discovery-proof-and-trust/</a></span><br>In any case, in the context of enterprise search, Google and other engines do not take any data at face value, but filter it for spam, and use a multitude of factors when assigning ranking to a resource. This is why you may not see your products being returned as rich snippets in search results, even if you have product pages marked in in RDFa, GoodRelations or hProduct.</div></div><br></body></html>