Everything Old is New Again

Back in 2012 I owned a successful article directory, PR2, good traffic and good earnings from Adsense and links. The quality of the articles was not good, the usual spam produced by tools, some of it really bad. One day in GWT, I got that email that everyone got who owned a directory, about a violation of Google's terms and that my site was deindexed. I decided to keep the directory, and I made a little money from charging people who don't know how to check that the site was deindexed for link removal. (Why is the world so full of people who think you are going to be ecstatic at the prospect of working for them for free, cleaning up their SEO mistakes by removing links? How did remoov build a business on this? Who actually removes the links?)

Everything remained the same, the good old status quo, until last week when I got another email from GWT telling me that there might be a problem with my site in that not all my links were successfully crawled. My first thought was what? Next I did site:nameofmyarticledirectory.com in google and rather than zero hits like I had seen for over a year, I see over 7K hits. Google is slowly reindexing my site! So everything that was old and deindexed is new and reindexed again. I've even got the question mark in the google PR checker for a new site.

Stuff like this just make me smile.

Hey, I just noticed my site is too!

Even has ratings data in the serps. Nice

That's great. Congratulations. I wonder how long it will take G to figure this out and screw us a second time.

KHMNTCPR8 said:

Hey, I just noticed my site is too!

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Haha, aw man... True.... lol..

Seems like penalty expired.

MTUser2010 said:

That's great. Congratulations. I wonder how long it will take G to figure this out and screw us a second time.

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Probably not long, now that they've found a flaw in their update.

Point taken. I'll report back. It doesn't really matter whether my site is indexed or not. The only value in these kind of sites now is link removal if you have a low cost of ownership.

sn0rt said:

Probably not long, now that they've found a flaw in their update.

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Just goes to show that the big G does not have their act together or know what they're
doing half of the time.

rabbitking said:

Just goes to show that the big G does not have their act together or know what they're
doing half of the time.

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Well, as marketers that use google for their income, whether direct or indirect, you have to understand a couple of simple things.

1. Google will never be perfect.
-Google was created by people, people aren't perfect. Imperfect people use google and as much as a team may be able to predict, there will always be variables.
2. Google will always make changes.
-The way technology is used changes. There are many variables, some that can be thought of, and there are those that can't. Some can be controlled, others can't. The way search is done today is already "old", the only reason why it still happens this way is because there hasn't been a new system developed yet. People are dying to use the "next google" it's just not out yet.

The main point is that a webmaster's site is banned if they are detected manual spam action, maybe removed from SERP with no action.

This may not necessarily be a flaw in the algorithm. Manual penalties do expire according to Matt Cutts. Nevertheless, congrats! If I was the owner of that article directory, it wouldn't have stayed up long enough to recover from the penalty. I would have deleted it a long time ago.