artizhay
BANNED
- Nov 21, 2010
- 1,867
- 1,340
It's like World War 3 out there. Appreciate their quick updates.
And an update:
Network Deindexing and High PR Society
Heya -
I've always been completely transparent with our operations and this email is an effort to keep you in the loop with what is going on with our site and networks in general...
Please read this ENTIRE email. All of your questions will be answered either here or in our forum.
Around a month ago several networks - SEO Nitro (Dori Friend), HomePageBacklinks.com (Terry Kyle), Backlink Monster (Brad Callen), etc - got largely deindexed by Google. As soon as that happened we locked down HPS to new users, changed hosting, and went underground as best we could. Our goal was to protect the service for our users and ourself.
Unfortunately, a few days ago our luck ran out. A bit more than half of our sites were deindexed. We've seen sites drop and come back, but I don't think that's going to happen this time.
While we planned for a 10-20% drop in PR/indexing every month, we'd been lucky enough to have less than 1% drop each month. In our case, we had "quality" sites and the PR stuck. Losing sites is normal and expected for every network, including ours.
There is a lot of chatter in the forums, and many of us large network owners have been talking behind the scenes about what the cause is/was.
If you want to read my take on the network deindexing reasons, check it out in our forum: http://forums.hkseo.us/Thread-The-recent-network-deindexing-problems
Now for the good news...
We closed down HPS to new members well before we were at capacity. Our current sites are at ~70% utilization AND we have at least 600 completely unused PR sites. We have enough sites to replace the ones that were lost.
We're also in discussions with possible domainer partners to add even more.
Unfortunately setting up 50%+ of our sites is a large undertaking, so it's going to take us a few days to bring the new sites online and replace the old ones. Please be patient with us while this happens.
I'll email to let you know when the transition is complete.
What does this mean to you:
Your articles and comments will not be going out across deindexed sites. No need to worry!
If you have a home page or contextual link on a now-dead site, we'll move it to a valid site automatically. This has always happened and will continue to do so, typically on Friday.
We may not have enough PR4s to move all the links. If that happens, we'll move you to a PR3 and charge the lower price. If we happen to run out of PR3s then we'll remove the link completely. (We haven't done the full analysis so I'm not sure if this is going to happen, but I want to make you aware.)
The average PR was ~2.6. I expect that this may drop down to 2.2. I'll let you know when we have a final total. (This is still higher than any other network that I'm aware of.)
We also may change the way the site works to make it more exclusive and effective for current members. That may mean:
Split into two services for larger accounts and smaller ones.
Raising prices so we can be ready with more domains should this happen again.
Setting up several smaller/isolated networks instead of one large one.
If you have an opinion, please pop into our discussion thread here:
http://forums.hkseo.us/Thread-HPS-and-Deindexing
My commitment is in delivering sites and services that help rank your keywords. We've had a week-long (and expensive) setback due to Google, but we were well prepared and will be back to full strength in a few days. No big deal!
Justin "Keeping up the good fight!" Anderson
HKSEO
This isn't the end of the world. It just means some overtime for the HKSEO team for the next few days. And it should remind ALL SEOs about the importance of using diversity in link building.
And an update:
Here is an insiders update on the network deindexing issue going on right now. Feel free to comment or ask questions in here so we can get a discussion going.
Build My Rank
- Private network (All sites are theirs, possible footprint)
- Highest quality articles. Each had to pass copyscape and make sense.
- They announced yesterday that they were hit in a major way, some people claiming 100% deindexing.
Article Links Network
- Public network (The sites aren't theirs. Small/no footprint)
- Spammed to death. Blogs would get tons of posts a day, would accept junk content.
- They announced that they've lost more than 1/3 of their 15,000+ sites.
Private Network Owner "J"
- Fully private network of over 2000 sites. Only he posted on the network.
- Content was average quality.
- Lost 90% around a month ago.
As "J" lost his network, we compared notes. Our network was staying alive while his was getting destroyed. As it turns out, we were both using SEOHosting.com. We both had multiple servers with them and we noticed that his servers were getting taken down one by one. We had overlap with him on one server, and that server had around 50% deindexing for us. That day we moved hosting and locked things down and everything has been great for a month.
He did everything right with his network footprint, just like we did. The networks were as invisible to bots as they could be. Dynamic HTML and CSS. Spun privacy policies and nav titles. Varying OBL and pagination. Even diverse name servers. But what we found was that all of our sites resolved into SEOHosting IP space. So even though they have a bazillion IPs, that is a probable footprint.
That tells me that from the nameserver IPs, Google knew the sites to look and (probably) stuck all sites in that IP range into manual review. That explains how they were walking down his servers day by day as he watched.
At the same time, look at ALN which doesn't share these same characteristics at all. I haven't looked at their code, but I suspect they had little to no footprint because each site was owned by different individuals. The fact that 1/3 of their network has been hit tells me that this is a totally manual unraveling of their network. Someone is taking the time to take them down.
What are the lessons learned?
- Be as diverse as ALN with IPs and hosting. Make it hard on Google to trace out the network.
- Keep the networks as closed as possible. Make smaller networks to diversify risk.
- Continue diverse link building. Putting all eggs in one basket is risky, as we've seen.
- Article quality makes zero difference in the network staying alive.
In the end, what does this mean? How long until Google moves on to more important things like actually making search better? What happens when someone decides to make a product around attack based SEO (which we've tested extensively and proved is possible a year ago)? Who knows...
We're in it for the long haul with you, though...
