F#ck Google! Lessons Learned

[Eagle Eye]

I hope you can work this out dude and it sucks that this happened to you. I have been thinking the same as you the more you try to please google the more you are at there mercy. there has to be a better way that you can count on for the long term.

 

[Spaceman]

I hate google. I f****** hate them BIG time.

 

[xboxps3wow]

You have been hit by the Panda update, which of course deletes all the websites that doesn't make google money from the front pages.

 

[dizz]

I wrote a thread about how they are trying to take the backlink business over and now i also notice that cirtain sites have trouble loading on chrome.

Dizz

 

[scottx1995]

So I got this crazy idea. What if my sites got hit exactly because I was ranking above some big player? I mean there is no way to prove this but it is a plausible explanation. I mean cNet is making millions of dollars monthly and my site was making just a few thousand dollars. But this is exactly my point. They buy adwords worth of millions each month. Maybe I was a nuisance so they just called their guy at Google/adwords and said "hey this little site pisses us off, can you do something about it?". Yeah it is kinda like a conspiracy theory, but it is actually the one that makes sense most. While now I rank somewhere around #50-70 for every single keyword, and there are lots of crappy thin affiliate sites, microniche sites, splogs, autoblogs, etc. ranking above me, no such site ranks #1-5. Now, #1-5 is ruled by 2 big sites (1 is cNet), generally with double listing.

this.. is what happend to you , company s that make a lot of money ALWAYS throw their weight around to influence things, just the way the world works.

 

[TeenAngel]

• Don't just use a SEO Host company, they leave footprints too. If you want to build networks of sites just buy shared hosting from a bunch of places. It is a lot more expensive than the cheap $1/mo seo hosts but it is untrackable. Plus, if your seo host company goes belly up you end up with 300 sites down at the same time. What bigger footprint than that can you leave?! Btw, I hevn't really used blog/site networks to grow these sites of mine that got penalized. As I said, those were 100% white hat and had natural growth.

Sorry, I'm a super noob. How do you set up a shared hosting from a bunch of places? I don't want what happened to your sites to happen to mine.

 

[raybes]

I wrote a thread about how they are trying to take the backlink business over and now i also notice that cirtain sites have trouble loading on chrome.

Dizz

Certain sites not loading seems more likely to be a coding issue than google actively interfering with anything... there are differences between browsers in how certain attributes must be defined and how they are interpreted.

 

[BlackxHat]

i got a few questions, what do u mean by ' -50 penalty across all keywords and pages', you went from ranking #1 to 50? also how many backlinks did this site show in yahoo explorer, what was your PR? also when you did the reconsideration request, what were you requesting, that your site rank at the top again?

 

[madoctopus]

Just reading "Feeding the Panda"
"
Other sites that were hit hard were older sites that had maintained their rankings and traffic for many years despite becoming very dated and static. This release apparently somewhat reduced the impact of domain age on the algorithm and many very entrenched older sites were shocked as their rankings eroded"

Maybe this affected you as well ... just a long shot

I haven't updated the sites in a while. However they are not ranking poorly they have a hard penalty of -50 positions. I have made a site for a friend a while ago (same niche) and he never got to work on it so it is not updated either but it ranks #5 for some keywords.

Also, to whoever said it is Panda, it is NOT. My sites got hit before the Panda rollout and Panda is keyword/URL specifc not sitewide penalty. Also panda just drops you in the serps various positions for various URLs, I am hit -50 across the board.

Regarding many shared hosts - if you have more than one site in one niche, have each on a different host instead of both on the same host. Is more expensive but if one gets hit, the other could survive.

 

[dizz]

I thought that at first too but now IDK.

Certain sites not loading seems more likely to be a coding issue than google actively interfering with anything... there are differences between browsers in how certain attributes must be defined and how they are interpreted.

 

[Justin Tyme]

Paranoid...aren't we??

I dont think he is paranoid at all. In fact I think he was being conservative. Google must die.

 

[reallife]

Whatever anyone does, don't listen to G's explanations. They're misleading at best.

They claimed Panda was all about content.
My sites with original content got hit hard by Panda 1.0 (although some have since come back in later Panda updates) and sites with nothing but crap replaced them, in many cases.
But in March, as soon as I started playing around with linking structure, placement, etc. - things improved to a large degree. So Panda was *not* just about content - that's just the propaganda.

And I firmly believe that anything else they say is propaganda as well. Not *all* incorrect, just enough of it so that you'll never know the truth.

OP, hope you get it figured out.

 

[Jonny Quick]

Google is giving higher ranking to authority sites. You can provide a really well written, useful article but Google won't care if they see high authority sites in the same niche. They are no longer just listing sites based on uniqueness of their content. So, the focus for everyone should be to focus on branding and authority.

http://www.precursorblog.com/content/google-now-admits-its-search-isnt-neutral

The Wall Street Journal also http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/01/19/google-advertises-its-china-position-with-search-ads/ 1-19-10 that Google is not neutral in the auction ranking of its search ads either:

• "...advertisers often wonder whether Google's ads are changing the ranking of their own. He also noted that buying ads for certain corporate issues-such as the cyber attacks-but not others could "raise some questions" about why the company is highlighting certain topics over others."

I agree with Monrox and I like the idea of maintaing a failing endeavor as a constant reminder of what the path to failure looks like.

Almost every official standing is pure BS, from Monsanto's to your local police department's. Anyone who has ever had a job has seen that over and over again for their respective company. SE's ranking decisions fail under freedom of speech. That freedom is granted even for money making activities. So whoever believes in utter goodness will inevitably crash & burn. I mean every search engine has a right to profit as much as it likes. Why give it up?

I keep my wh sites operational just for the slim possibility that some anti-monopolistic decision will put a stop to the rampant misuse of search domination and also as a reminder that following official guidlines doesn't get me anywhere currently.

You cannot apply a single standard to large, multi-national corporate behemoths, and apply that same standard to single individuals trying to earn a living, point to the uniformity of that standard's application and enforcement as proof of "fairness". That's just plain stupid, and anyone that believes this is also stupid. In actual practice, only thing that's uniform is the verbage. The standards aren't even uniform, they are biased in favor of the monoliths.

That's why the world need pirates, who are heros. We recognize that there is a larger picture than the limited one we are expected to operate within, to our own, mutual destruction.

 

[madoctopus]

i got a few questions, what do u mean by ' -50 penalty across all keywords and pages', you went from ranking #1 to 50? also how many backlinks did this site show in yahoo explorer, what was your PR? also when you did the reconsideration request, what were you requesting, that your site rank at the top again?

If I ranked #1 now I rank just under #50. If I ranked #7 now I rank around #60. For any and every keyword with any and every page on my site (for all penalized sites). This applies to image search as well (again about 50 spots lower). One site started to rank around #5 in image search about a week ago. It used to be around #50 and above were my images stolen by other sites. I contacted those sites with DMCA requests to take the content down and after they did, this site of mine jumped up in image search.

linkdomain:www.mysite.com -site:www.mysite.com

Site 1: 1000 in yahoo, around 10,000 in majesticseo, PR 3
Site 2: 1000 in yahoo, around 10,000 in majesticseo, PR 3
Site 3: 400 in yahoo, PR 2 (this is the site that wasn't ranking high or had much traffic before either)

Content was not stolen a lot. One paragraph from each post is used on several mashup sites. Several posts got stolen completely but they don't rank above me (the stolen images did outrank me).

I get links from many splogs, microniche sites, etc. which link to several authority sites to avoid footprints.

Had no unusual spike in link discovery on majesticseo (as far as I can tell) so I don't think a competitor blasted poor quality links at my sites.

 

[madoctopus]

Whatever anyone does, don't listen to G's explanations. They're misleading at best.

They claimed Panda was all about content.
My sites with original content got hit hard by Panda 1.0 (although some have since come back in later Panda updates) and sites with nothing but crap replaced them, in many cases.
But in March, as soon as I started playing around with linking structure, placement, etc. - things improved to a large degree. So Panda was *not* just about content - that's just the propaganda.

And I firmly believe that anything else they say is propaganda as well. Not *all* incorrect, just enough of it so that you'll never know the truth.

OP, hope you get it figured out.

I might be wrong here but I have never found a single piece of information from Google itself saying that Panda is about content. This message was in fact perpetuated by the "seo gurus". Google talked about quality. They never said they analyze just content.

 

[reallife]

I might be wrong here but I have never found a single piece of information from Google itself saying that Panda is about content. This message was in fact perpetuated by the "seo gurus". Google talked about quality. They never said they analyze just content.

They've danced around it without putting it into a declarative statement - for example, in a story about Cutts at SMX Seattle:
"Cutts suggested that good content will help pages see high rankings even when overall sites have been negatively impacted by Panda."

 

[madoctopus]

They've danced around it without putting it into a declarative statement - for example, in a story about Cutts at SMX Seattle:
"Cutts suggested that good content will help pages see high rankings even when overall sites have been negatively impacted by Panda."

Please, not a quote from Matt Cutts tagged as "reliable". They say that since Google started to fight webspam. But, while they kinda imply stuff, they never said Panda is about analyzing content alone. As a matter of fact I think content analysis is a lot harder than link analysis. Except for finding duplicate/copied text you can't really use a computer to figure out how good content is. Not even a human can do that well. If I write about quantum mechanics I might totally bullshit you, but I can do it in a way that would make you think is reliable information. Yet I have no knowledge of physics whatsoever.

 

[reallife]

Please, not a quote from Matt Cutts tagged as "reliable". They say that since Google started to fight webspam. But, while they kinda imply stuff, they never said Panda is about analyzing content alone. As a matter of fact I think content analysis is a lot harder than link analysis. Except for finding duplicate/copied text you can't really use a computer to figure out how good content is. Not even a human can do that well. If I write about quantum mechanics I might totally bullshit you, but I can do it in a way that would make you think is reliable information. Yet I have no knowledge of physics whatsoever.

Hey, I'm basically agreeing with you here.
I'm not relying on him for anything - remember, I called everything he says "propaganda." I was just saying that they always just "imply" - and this time, they've implied that it's content-policing. Not saying I believe any of it. And I also said that when I altered link structure, that changed my rankings post-Panda; meaning I agree with you that link analysis is a large part of what they've been doing.

 

[whodatvoodoo]

There were more tweaks then just panda and threre's are more to come. If you depend on google try reading feeding the panda it's in the downloads it might shed some light on a mistake you might not even be aware of. And good luck man, hope you get your spot back.

 

[xphase]

I've heard about this happening to many people for no reason. I wouldn't be surprised if someone is pocketing some money over this.