Now, that we can assume that Qype received a Google-penalty on its “www.qype.com/place/”-subdirectory, which causes all of the those sites to either not rank at all or only rank far to the back or the results, we can start with the real work: we have to figure out and evaluate possible reasons for this penalty. At this stage, I have to issue a stern warning to not stop searching for answers and just take the first explanation as truth – in too many cases there is a combination of reasons for a penalty and if you only concentrate on one, you will often not get rid of the penalty. In Qype's case I noticed the following problems:

Sprawling Website
Those of you who attended one or more of Jens lectures should have an idea of what Information-Architecture means: in a nutshell, it is about a meaningful array of available content that helps both users as well as searchengines. Qype is demonstrating how important and useful this is, especially for large projects that grew organically. It seems that while the site grew noticeably and added new countries, their SEO-concept was not up to speed with this growth: while certain practices might work without a problem on a smaller scale, they can quickly become a problem if they are not specifically controlled. There are a number of examples for this with Qype and I want to present two of them:

For large cities like Berlin, it surely is a good idea for services like Qype to show shops on a district-level: no one is going to suffer through the capitals public transportation system for an hour just to get to the kebab shop at the other end of town. Qype deals with this by putting the district into the URL for new shops (I have absolutely no idea why they still have the “preview” in there): qype.com/place/preview/[...]-mitte-berlin. This becomes a problem because you can also find the same location through the general URL (qype.com/place/preview/[...]-berlin) as well – and both versions show up in the Googleindex: classic duplicate-content. This is intensified even more because Qype is adding thise empty company-profiles to every country-domain.


The second example is their handling of tags, or cues how they are called in Qype. Users and shop-owners can put in any keyword and are actively taking advantage of this feature. The problem is that Qype will throw every combination of city- and district-tags into the index without checking them first. This might churn out relatively nice pages for general terms that are represented quite often, but for terms that are seldomly used, this ends up creating numerous pages with only one entry. This is once again intensified by the fact that these tags are put into the index for the city in general as well as for each district.

Miserable Linkbuilding
If someone had told me one week ago that Qype was actively building links, I would not have believed a word of it. Why should a site that can get a near unlimited amount of links from rated restaurants, users, cities and similar domains go against Google's guidelines and purchase links? I have no answer to this – though there are enough examples of these obvious and badly done links, that I feel like it is 2005 all over again. The way that they integrated the links could prove as an example on how not to do it: usually they are boxed in and labeled with “advertisement”, they are usually accompanied by three to four additional links to commercial webpages (which are usually known linkbuyers) and they have the same linktext most of the time. Something amusing that comes from this story is the fact that the links often link to the literal translation of “places in berlin” - while this still makes a little bit of sense in English, it is a good sign that this was done neither by native speaker nor by professionals.

Rankings for Sale
Google reacts allergically to any attempt of trying to directly sell organic rankings. A few month ago for example, there was a provider that wanted to sell optimized landingpages on high-trust-domains to advertisers – Google quickly took all of the recommendation-integrations out of the index and thereby ended this procedure before it really got off the ground. This makes sense, seeing how it is a direct attack on Google's cashcow AdWords.

While Qype's approach is not quite as crude, at heart they are doing something similar. On the pages that promote the paid Premium-Entries to businness-owners, they are promoting the fact that that this service includes 50 keywords that can be chosen by the shop-owners, which will then be listed in the top searchengine positions (namely Google). The FAQ has some more informations on this subject and notes that premium-partners can take control over the listings shown by Google. Rather clumsy.

Conflict with Google-Interests
By now, Google has also become content-provider: their local yellow-pages do exactly what Qype does, too. At the same time, Qype is by far the largest provider of user-impressions for the German version of the yellow-pages. They could have thought that listing them twice, once in the Universal-Search-integration and once in the organic index, would be too much and that they would rather have the users read the summarized opinions on their own product. I do not think that such a train of though would directly influence the rankings, but it seems plausible that this might make Google take a closer look at the mistakes of certain domains.

Seeing how this has once again turned into a longer article, tomorrow, I will get to the fourth and last part of this series. What changes should Qype incorporate?

There is something rotten in the state of Qype
There is something rotten in the state of Qype - part II
There is something rotten in the state of Qype - part III
There is something rotten in the state of Qype - part IV