GoDaddy: The Latest To Get Slapped

[InitialEffort]

See the article here by Yoast SEO:

GoDaddy's spammy link building techniques • Yoast

[RevSEO]

Oh geeze.... And people are surprised by this? Why?
This is a billion dollar company competing in a billion dollar
industry. Just take a look at their checkout process, it's
practically Russian roulette with your credit card to not
buy extra services that you don't need on checkout.

Let's be serious here though, the moral of the story is quit
listening to Google. Most of what they tell us is smoke and
mirrors, trying to tell us that one method doesn't work when
clearly it does.

I'm not in front of my computer now, but isn't their software
free? If so how is this any different than links from free Wordpress
themes or templates. Heck, even paid themes have links in them
so how is this spammy? Seems this guys bitter. Frankly I see a huge
opportunity here that he seemed to completely overlook in his bitter
post about how GoDaddys dominating the SERPS now.

[caseycase]

Seems like fairly standard practice to me. I am surprised anyone would be angry about GoDaddy doing that. There are plenty of other things to be mad at GoDaddy about.

[bhuff85]

Originally Posted by RevSEO

If so how is this any different than links from free Wordpress
themes or templates. Heck, even paid themes have links in them
so how is this spammy? Seems this guys bitter. Frankly I see a huge
opportunity here that he seemed to completely overlook in his bitter
post about how GoDaddys dominating the SERPS now.

I think what he was more referring to in that blog post was that there is an anchor text link along with the image that isn't shown in the preview, whereas wordpress and other services use their company name instead keyword phrase anchor text links.

If they were to use "GoDaddy" or "GoDaddy.com" as anchor text instead of "web hosting companies", then it most likely wouldn't have been a big issue. That's what I got from his post, anyway.

[gearmonkey]

Whenever I use wordpress I remove the permalink; "Powered by Wordpress" from the footer. I also remove the theme credits. It's spam as far as I'm concerned.

Perhaps companies are getting away with it for now, but it'll be short term. Google is always changing. What works today won't work tomorrow.

[MikeFriedman]

I do not see a thing wrong with what GoDaddy is doing. It is very similar to what many IM'ers and businesses do with typical linkbaiting tactics.

This part of the article...

GoDaddy is playing this game a bit too aggressively in my opinion, and Google should really start discounting those links. The right way would be for GoDaddy to ask their customers whether they're allowed to insert a link and make them choose where it points.

I completely disagree with. There is absolutely no reason for Google to discount the links. And I'm sure that GoDaddy has the appropriate legal language in the 'Website Tonight' package that customers are actually agreeing to allow the links when they sign up.

Nobody is forcing anyone to use GoDaddy's service. There are plenty of alternatives.

I do not see anything spammy about this at all. I think it is smart of them to do.

And anyone trying to compare this to what happened with JCPenney or Overstock is just being ridiculous. GoDaddy is doing nothing like that.

[bhuff85]

Originally Posted by gearmonkey

Whenever I use wordpress I remove the permalink; "Powered by Wordpress" from the footer. I also remove the theme credits. It's spam as far as I'm concerned.

Perhaps companies are getting away with it for now, but it'll be short term. Google is always changing. What works today won't work tomorrow.

Removing the theme credits and saying it is spam is really no different than someone stealing an article and removing the links in the resource box and labeling those links as spam. You're essentially stealing their work and not giving them credit for it, plain and simple.

That's far from spam - it's the trade off from using their theme for free.

[Juvv2096]

I think its funny how people get upset about things that are pretty much irrelevant and they have no control over anyway so whats the point?

[outwest]

IMO Godaddys business tactics have always been slimy, in all aspects of their operations

[transcriptionservices]

hey,
I never like the tactics of go daddy. They dont care much of building a reputation.

[kokopelli]

Coming from Yoast, this criticism is rich. They use the very same tactic of adding backlinks to their plugins, or spamming you in your WordPress dashboard. There is even a plugin to get rid of that: Yoast Remove (I use it).

BTW I'm not saying creating backlinks like this is wrong, I'm just pointing out the fact that many do it, even those who sometimes "complain" so vocally ...

[gearmonkey]

Originally Posted by bhuff85

Removing the theme credits and saying it is spam is really no different than someone stealing an article and removing the links in the resource box and labeling those links as spam. You're essentially stealing their work and not giving them credit for it, plain and simple.

That's far from spam - it's the trade off from using their theme for free.

I typically don't use 'free' themes, I use premium [outdated] nulled themes because I don't need support from the original author. I don't want OBLs in my footer because Google frowns upon it. I don't have any links in my footer on most of my blogs.

I don't see anything wrong with it. I'm using an outdated theme from an author I won't bother with for support. If I understand the rules of Wordpress correctly, they require coders and authors to be open source (and GPL2 compliant).