Email Reputation Causes Penalties in Google Search Results

I left a "this isn't true" comment on the original thread but I think the comment will need moderator approval.

"There’s really only one way to solve an email reputation problem. You have to make an effort to clean up your list. Here again I was thankful for the awesome reporting built into Aweber. I was able to quickly track down which subscribers were receiving my emails via @gmail.com addresses but not opening the email."<p>Does this reporting use some method other than tracked image loading (which GMail disables by default)?

I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn this isn't _technically_ true (as Matt Cutts says), but that something like it is indeed a signal in the search algorithm which in at least some cases produces the behaviour described.<p>I'd be very cautious advising clients to have links to their websites sent out in large, obviously spammy email campaigns.<p>Matt's quite likely being 100% honest when he says the domain sending the mail doesn't get penalised in search.<p>I wonder if he'd be quite as quick to explain whether the domains in links inside spam received by gmail are fed back into the search algorithm (or, if gmail doesn't feed that directly, whether the search team use honeypot gmail accounts to find it out themselves...)

Two prudent things to do when you see someone claiming to have insight into search algorithms -<p>Ask where they are getting their information. "A source at Google" doesn't cut it.<p>Ask yourself how much sense it makes. What is the likelihood that this could be a signal that improves search quality without causing significant collateral damage? Pretty low in this case.<p>I can think of plenty of genuinely high quality sites that do a horrible job with email. They probably send bad user signals through Gmail - but why should that impact web search? It shouldn't, and it doesn't.

I know for a fact that Gmail has implemented some (overly aggressive, and really far-reaching) "spam" triggers over the last few months. Many of them have been scaled way back over the past few weeks but the crux of the new Gmail "spam" filters centered around what Jake is explaining here: Non-engagement.<p>This is troubling in it's own right because of the possibility of exploitation for nefarious purposes to hurt someone else's site. I did not know about the possibility of search results being affected by the same overly-aggressive spam filters. This may not be the case, but if this is true, it is troubling.<p>The notion that email engagement is a good indicator of a site's sender reputation or a site's search reputation is problematic. This can be gamed so easily. I could set up 5,000 fake email addresses at gmail, subscribe to my competitor's email newsletter, and then never ever open any email for the next 6 months. Presumably, this would get them blacklisted in Gmail and (possibly) blacklisted and dropped from organic search results as well.<p>Cue the black market for non-engaging gmail accounts in 3...2...1...

The original blog poster left more details in the comments, which let me get to the bottom of this. If you want to know what really happened, here's my comment with the explanation: <a href="http://goo.gl/6A8f9" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/6A8f9</a>

Isn't email tracking usually done using an image beacon and aren't images turned off by default in GMail? It sounds to me like he may have accidentally purged a lot of active readers by putting too much faith in flawed reporting tools.<p>Sure, you should never send email to anyone who marked you as spam, but deleting people just because they don't have images turned on is probably overkill.

It makes a lot of sense to improve the performance of email campaigns, but to link poor email reception to Google Search penalties is highly speculative and misguided.<p>The site in question was most likely affected by the Panda update which was released (in several iterations) around the same time and looking at the articles on the site I can see why this could've happened.

Hi Matt<p>I am the biggest fan of yours on the earth , What about Google Group emails and spamming ?

FWIW, mail service Campaign Monitor have picked up on this as possibly true, while stopping short on actually advising people to make list changes as a result:<p><a href="http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/3486/do-email-newsletters-affect-google-page-ranking/" rel="nofollow">http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/3486/do-email-newsl...</a>