Spammy Email Could Sabotage Your Google Rankings

Just when search engine marketers were trying to get the Google Alphabet situation straight in their minds, a new professional consideration entered on the periphery. Barely noticed and also on Aug. 10, Search Engine Watch revealed that Google got a patent for allowing email marketing to aid in its search engine rankings.

Actually, the patent Dave Davies discussed was issued to Google on July 30, but as is the nature of these filings, the title “Email Spam and Junk Mail as a Vendor Reliability Signal” was less than electrifying. Plus, the filing date of March 7, 2012, may have meant that very few industry watchers were watching for the patent publish date in order to write up hourly reports.

Yet, as Davies writes on Aug. 10 in “Your Email Marketing May Impact Your Rankings,” Google’s patent may keep vendors who send spam and junk email pinned to lower search engine rankings.

Your #EmailMarketing May Impact Your Rankings by @beanstalkim - http://t.co/oQRFVtsAbI via @sewatch #seo pic.twitter.com/qk8rFfTyvX

— SEMrush (@semrush) August 10, 2015

“A reliable and honest vendor tends not to spam,” Davies says. “In the patent application, Google discusses various mechanisms for the classification of a vendor as reliable. Most of it revolves around using multiple systems and lists to determine the frequency of email spam coming from a vendor, and the possible classification of said vendor as unreliable in light of that action.”

The writer adds that this rule-setting may not be limited to email filtering, though. Google may also crawl the links in the email message and tie them to the reliability of the vendor’s site, Davies says. This published patent, which may or may not become a reality, also clues search engine marketers into the fact that Google is looking beyond “the visible Web” to determine the reliability of vendors for its audience.

This sentence from the Google email-to-search ranking document on Patentdocs shows a glimpse of how the search giant is considering the world outside websites: “Reliability value may be provided through, … (for example, through a Web service, a query of [a] storage location …) to a website, Web application, or one or more meta-shopping services operating, for example, on [a] remote Web server.”

Will this revelation make some white-hat brands in search, but black-hat elsewhere modify their marketing practices?

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