Update: Matt Cutts has chipped in around the web saying that this isn’t true — including in the comments below. Read Matt Cutts: Your newsletter won’t affect your search rankings after all for more information.
Even if your site’s content is up to scratch, Google will penalize your website if you’ve got too many inactive users subscribed to a newsletter with a reply address from the same domain name, LockerGnome’s Jake Ludington reports after investigating his own site’s drop in search traffic.
Google is now using the information it gleans from its Gmail users to improve its spam filtering functionality to penalize accompanying sites in its search listings. Even if you follow best practices for email marketing, Ludington’s report says, you’re still likely to be in trouble. If you have a high number of legitimate subscribers who don’t open your emails regularly, your site is likely to end up in the search engine’s spam bin.
The good news is that the problem can be fixed. Most providers of email marketing services, such as Aweber and Mailchimp, provide you with detailed information on which subscribers are opening your emails regularly and which are letting them gather dust or just deleting them without reading them.
Ludington suggests that removing these users manually is more effective than asking your users to repeat their opt-in — those who lost interest are likely to lose interest again.
“I chose a cutoff date. Anyone who subscribed before that date and hadn’t engaged with the newsletter in the last 90 days was deleted from my subscriber database. I started with @gmail.com addresses, because those were the ones closest to my source of pain. I then expanded my purge to anyone who matched my criteria from any domain. I purged about 13,000 subscribers. I’m now repeating this process at the end of every month,” says Ludington.
Once you’ve completed a purge of your mailing list’s cruft, you can use Google’s reinclusion request form to get back into the index. Ludington’s story ends happily: after he described in detail what he had done and how he plans to prevent the issue from appearing again, Google removed his site from the spam bin.
Wow, just goes to show that Google is getting altogether too much power with the circle of gmail and all other apps!
Follow the first link and you’ll see that Matt Cutts debunks this claim. Search is significantly different from email. I really don’t see the correlation. Perhaps for a more personalized search experience, but I highly doubt it.
I can confirm this (I operate a big travellling company in France and came to the same results a few weeks ago)
Interesting article Joel. But I am not really sure if it is the right way to determine site ranking. For a simple reason, to promote a products within the site , idea alway is to make the information reach to as many people as possible. And there is always x% of people who will never open that email. Which means that a medium of spreading information is getting hampered.
Thanks
Google can’t debunk Google. That’s just a little biased.
Govoy, you can confirm what?
You went through the same process and achieved the same results? How many email subscribers do you have and how many did you scrub?
Also, what tipped you off that email was your issue?
We have around 260 000 suscribers, and took off 60% of them a little more than one month ago (these are weekly offers email). We did not make any change to the website or any change on our SEM or SEO actions, and suddenly got 60% more organic traffic ( 1 month ie 4 newsletters after the big flush).
We took off all hard bounces + eery user that had not opt-in in the 12 last months (anayway, this should have been done before, as this is mandatory in France : the opt-in is only valid for 1 year).
We also noticed a better delivery (only considering the emails that are kept off course) : opening was 12 % better (108% considering the whole base).
I just don’t think that any ranking signals should be contingent upon how good or bad a company’s email marketing efforts are. It’s irrelevant IMO. I will be testing this nonetheless. @Joseph McCullough
@govoy interesting.. currently I am changing SEO for my site.. its still not over and now I hv to remove the useless subscribers also.. Its really frustrating that Googl echanges its algos so often… I have 500+ subscribers. Do i also need to do the same as u did for 260k one?
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Atul, I’m sure a small list like 500 subscribers will not make any difference.
Normally a large list is potentially harmfull as it will contain a lot of bad-quality email addresses and will trigger at the receiving mailside (in this case Gmail) a “possible spam” in case the rate is bad adresses is too high. For example, I believe in Hotmail the ratio is 0.3 (so 3 adresses out of 1000 are allowed to be wrong).
Maybe Google is just connecting the dots between their SEO and email and have put this into production just to see how things work out.
Nevertheless, always think about using a specialised ESP (like the ones mentioned in the article or our myMailMarket email application) to send to large lists, to increase your chance of delivering
@mymailmarket Thanks for clearing the doubts. Does inactive subscribers also count here. Inactive I mean to say tht the subscribers who registered for teh subscription but failed to even activate it… I have 1500 subscribers but only 500 have tehir accounst active.
Also, I want to use ESPs like Aweber etc but since I m not erning so much, so I cant use any paid subscription for the time being :)
@Atul Kumar You should not sent out your campaigns to the inactive subscribers.
When you follow that rule, there will not be a problem for Gmail (or other providers) as they won’t receive any email (except off course your 500 active subscribers).
In fact, in our system it is configured that subscribers that didn’t active their email within a timespan of 2 weeks, they are just removed from the system. The only thing they do is litering you’re addresslist.
Taking off all permanent failure hard bounces is a must for any list. Some email service providers will do this by itself after one bounce (i.e. Mailchimp) while others require multiple bounces (i.e. Exacttarget and iContact).
Interesting thought but also needs a more research and sharing of experiences. To state that the open rate of your e-mail campaign will have the effect that “your site site is likely to end up in the search engine’s spam bin” after one ‘sighting’ is quite a fast conclusion. Plus – if Google uses it as a signal – I don’t think this signal alone can cause such a severe penalty. We don’t know what other signals could have caused this drop in traffic – I think of the Panda update among one of the options that could have caused this.
Interesting thought but also needs a bit more research and sharing of experiences. To state that the open rate of your e-mail campaign will have the effect that “your site site is likely to end up in the search engine’s spam bin” after one ‘sighting’ is quite a fast conclusion. Plus – if Google uses it as a signal – I don’t think this signal alone can cause such a severe penalty. We don’t know what other signals could have caused this drop in traffic – I think of the Panda update among one of the options that could have caused this.
@Matt Cutts Thank you for the update Matt, we’ll be publishing a new post shortly correcting things and quote your comment on the other blog