Slashdot Mirror
Businesses Scramble To Stay Out of Google Hell
whoever57 writes "Forbes has up an article on the consequences of being dumped into a claimed 'supplemental index',
also known as 'Google Hell'. It uses the example of Skyfacet, a site selling diamonds rings and other jewelery, which has dropped in Google's rankings and saw a $500,000 drop in revenue in only three months after the site owner paid a marketing consultant to improve the sites. The article claims that sites in the supposed 'supplemental index' may be visited by Google's spiders as infrequently as once per year. The problem? Google's cache shows that Google's spiders visited the site ss recently as late April. 'Google Hell is the worst fear of the untold numbers of companies that depend on search results to keep their business visible online. Getting stuck there means most users will never see the site, or at least many of the site's pages, when they enter certain keywords. And getting out can be next to impossible--because site operators often don't know what they did to get placed there.'"
- Keep using the same domain name. Right now changing your domain name incurs a huge penalty from Google. You will lose 90% of your traffic for 8 months.
- Use unique titles and meta descriptions for each of your pages. If the titles and meta descriptions on two of your pages are the same, one or both of the pages will likely go into Google Hell
- Don't buy links to your site to boost your pagerank from unrelated sites. If Google sees links to your site on the same page as links to Viagra sites, you will likely get a spam penalty.
- Ensure that your content is original and unique. If you use syndicated content, or syndicate your content to other sites, Google will realize that the content exists in two places and put one of them into Google hell.
If you do get into Google hell:Google's obligation is to serve the consumer doing the search with the most accurate and fair results possible, not to ensure that sleezy companies paying big $ to "consultants" who game the system maintain their sales.
For shame, Forbes!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
When you hire a consultant specifically to improve your Google page rank, I guess you are opening yourself up to stuff like this. It sounds to me like this guy hired someone who thought they knew how to game the system, and the system gamed him back.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Sounds to me like they should have hired a more professional consultant, it seems to me thats who the company should immediately be blaming rather than Google.
Well they sure will be getting alot more hits now. It's on Slashdot, prepair to be slashdotted (AKA: Slashdothell)
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
"Forbes has up an article on the consequences of being dumped into a claimed 'spam index', also known as 'Mail Hell'. It uses the example of e360, a site selling mortgage refis and anatomical enlargement, which has dropped in graylist rankings and saw a $500,000 drop in revenue in only three months after the company paid a marketing consultant to improve the emails. The article claims that sites in the supposed 'spam index' may be re-evaluated as infrequently as once per year. The problem? The site was reevaluated as recently as late April. 'Mail Hell is the worst fear of the untold numbers of spammers that depend on breaking spam filters to keep their business visible online. Getting stuck there means most users will never see their emails. And getting out can be next to impossible--because spammers often don't know what they did to get placed there.'"
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I suppose this is Dante's 9th ring.
696e6b6564
Unfortunately that is the price you pay for basing your business on the assumption that a FREE SERVICE (namely Google's ranking system) will continue to work in your favor. Many businesses are getting their "advertising" for free by being ranked highly by Google, and prominently displayed in search results. Maybe they should consider paying for strategically placed ads like everybody else.
Oooops I didn't know that my "marketing consultant" was doing SEO spamming. Ooops I just paid him by accident to do "stuff".
Good that Google doesn't let that defense wash. Could you imagine what a better place the world would be if we could have a similar rule for email spam ? I cheer Google on for their anti spam efforts.
So basicly a guy paid a "consultant" to abuse how Google works and then when Google changed the system to stop this happening he complains that he got punished for it?
At what point is this guy any sort of victim when he knowingly exploited the system for his own gain and got caught with his hand in the cookie jar?
I like muppets.
In retrospect, Sanar thinks he can trace his problem to a search marketing consultant he had paid $35,000 to improve Skyfacet's Google rankings. He now believes the consultant mistakenly replicated content on many of the site's pages, making them look like duplicate--that is, spam--content. But even after he reversed the consultant's changes, he couldn't get Skyfacet's pages out of Google Hell, where they remain today.
Mistakenly? Really? Are you sure? I thought that was the SOP for search-engine gaming-- the amateurish ones that don't charge 35k for a net change of -$500k overall-- but still standard, ham-handed SEO nonetheless.
1) Go into business
2) Gather home pages of major competitors
3) Add links to these home pages on disreputable web sites
4) Watch their traffic go down.
5) Watch your traffic go up.
6) Profit
Just cant figure out where the "..." fits into this one.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
...make sure your site doesn't suck.
The world needs two or more independent, similarly popular engines. That decreases the likelihood of legitimate sites getting so thoroughly whacked.
I am by no means an SEO expert... but I've had VERY good luck with google indexes for the small sites I build for people. I've even gotten some business from it, because people some how think I'm some sort of genius. So what's my secret?
I READ THE INSTRUCTIONS AT GOOGLE FOR WHAT TO DO AND WHAT NOT TO DO AND I FOLLOWED THE RULES
If you simply follow the rules that google lays out, you won't get sucked into google hell. If you try and game the system by paying for consultants to "juice" your site, you gambled and lost. Bottom line: Don't be evil, and google will not punish you
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
I think this is evidence of a couple phenomena in modern business:
The first is what I guess I'll call push vs pull, and that's the difference between business that cater to people who have a specific need "Hey, I need food, so I'm going to look for a place where I can get it" and businesses that create things they try to sell that people don't necessarily need but will buy on impulse - for instance, those businesses that are always sending fliers in the mail to get you to buy things you might not otherwise need.
The other issue here is what I would call demand density - if a business has to be online to reach people across the globe, that means that demand density is very low. However, a grocery store has very high demand density - advertising is only necessary (if at all) over a very small geographic location because the market is local.
Now, I'm not sure if I fully understand all the pros and cons of trying to support businesses with very low demand density - is society as a whole better off with the mechanism to provide goods and service to very disperse locations, or is the effort required to distribute the goods / services over such a large location really worse than not supplying that demand and eliminating the transportation / communications infrastructure overhead?
More to the article's point, though, if I had to depend on a search service to get my business revenue, I would rethink my business plan. While I understand the ideas behind 'global economy' I am still a bit conservative in my belief in the merits of self-sufficiency; relying on a search service means that my business would be at the mercy of that service which I may not be able to control. Control is fairly important in businesses, I would think.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Here's a summary of the article (which I incidentally read yesterday):
Why sites go in Google hell is a total mystery.
Story 1: A guy sold diamonds on his site. One day he went to Google hell, but he had no idea why. Why is Google not telling him? He had no idea why this happened... ok... ok... so he paid 35 grand to a SEO "expert" who filled his pages with trash. He removed the trash and few months later he went out of Google hell. To this day he doesn't know how he went out of Google hell.
Story 2: A guy had a site with lots of visits from Google. One day, he went to Google hell, but he had no idea why. Why is Google not telling? Ok... ok... so he had paid for a ton of links from spam sites, and he had to email each of the sites to get the links removed. Few months later he went out of Google hell, and this guy also has no clue what helped him.
Summary: It's a total mystery, that Google hell, I tell you.
So they list two cases of people whining that they paid "consultants" to optimize their sites but got caught. And then make Google out to be the bad guy?
Both of the "businesses" seem shady to me anyways, and their practices on optimization only appear to confirm that. They got caught, Google did what it's supposed to do. Now they're being punished.
Sure, they may have reversed any of said optimization, but as the article even says, it can take 6 months to a year to be indexed again anyways. So take two of these and call us in a year...
First, go watch Blood Diamond and then come back and tell us why mean old Google won't let you scam the system.
Skyfacet's consultant didn't improve their rankings at all, instead causing them to plummet. One wonders just how lucrative this sort of thing is? After all, if this consultant has done this for them, perchance he/she/they have done it to others? Perchance it would be a good idea to a) sue them, b) report them to BBB, and c) begin a this-google-consultant-sucks.com website.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
for a real Google COmpetitor.
Right now it's Google and 'those others'.
MS hasn't even began to ctack the mind share, and they could if they did it right.
I could creat a company that competes with google and gets mind share, I only need 150 million to do it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So, these guys tried to game the system, got caught, and are now trying to play the victim?
They got what they deserved.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
After reading the article, I typed "diamonds" and "engagement ring" into Google, then looked at the sponsored links. No sign of skyfacet.com, Mr. Sanar's company. I find it hilarious that Sanar would pay $35,000 to some slimball "consultant" to try to distort the Google search rankings, but not spend one penny on Google sponsored links, which would put him on the first page every time.
I have zero sympathy for unscrupulous businessmen who try to game the system, get caught, and then whine about it. Kudos to Google for playing hardball and fighting to keeping their search engine useful and relevant instead of letting the spammers ruin it.
Your post makes no sense.
I'm not sure if you unserstand the term 'RTFA'.
I am not sure why the hell you think google it doing this to these sites as an attack of some kind. OH right, didn't RTFA.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In this age of social networking and Web 2.0, is your Google ranking as important as it once was for driving traffic to your website?
Follow me
This kind of thing has always baffled me. It is quite possible to conduct business online without relying solely on search engine traffic. While search engine traffic is valuable, if your business strategy is relying on that then you're placing your entire business in the hands of an independent party with it's own interests.
Google can do whatever the hell they want with their search index. Why on earth any company would place themselves entirely in someone else's hands, particularly someone else who doesn't have the slightest care in the world what happens to your business is really beyond me.
Any sane business person should enjoy search engine traffic when they have it, but place themselves primarily in the position where they don't need it. Relying entirely on an independent company with it's own interests for your business survival is beyond stupid.
with a $3,000,000 diamond business? He deserves to be in Google hell for that alone.
/goes to sit in the corner wondering what he did with his life/
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
Tere is no indications of that. The consultant sure is, but this guy couod very well be a guy that wanted his site to be improved and hired a consultant that turned out to be an idiot.
Not different then finding out the contractor you hired to do some work didn't build it to code.
Or a mechnic that doesn't properly torque the bolts in your engine.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I don't think you understand what "free market" means. Google owns the index, Google decides how it works. The searcher is their customer, NOT the "small business owner".
If they please their customers with the best possible results they will make more money. If they allow themselves to be gamed, searchers will go elsewhere and Google will lose money.
If you don't like that, go start your own search engine.
BTW, they have been sued over this kind of thing and they have always won. The ranking is their opinion and they are entitled to it.
n/t
Oh, come off it! For every company that drops on the ranking, there is another one that goes up, so while that specific company might earn less, another one will earn more. Complete economic fairness. And while I'm not a great fan of the ever expanding Google, it is good to remember that they are there to serve *us*, the content searching end users, not product offering companies.
No, what google understands is that there isn't any such thing as a "free market" so their doing their best to squeeze dollars out of their market. Which means to return relevant search results more often than their competitors. They do this by punishing people who try to game the system to seem more relevant than they really are.
Besides who made google the "free market" police? Google can do whatever they want, and as long as it makes searchers happy they are doing the right thing. They could easily redirect every search to auction.google.com, and it wouldn't be unethical, but they don't because they know people want to find what their looking for.
A class action lawsuit would be interesting. If the judge were sane (which I wouldn't bank on) he'd laugh the plaintiffs out of court. Google is under no obligation to index your site. That they do is a happy bonus, but if they stop you have no recourse. Does this make hitching your wagon to google a little risky? Sure, but there are worse bets out there.
On top of all this google offers a great way to increase your visibility - buy ads.
Why would you create a business around your rankings on search engines which everyone knows can change from day to day depending on other sites and ever changing ranking algorithms? Even when you're not paying some SEO guy ridiculous amounts of money to scam the system and get you stuck in Google Hell that's a rather obvious huge risk to be taking.
I understand that proper advertising is expensive, I've got a failed business of my own due to not being able to put the necessary money into it, but guess what? That's business. You pick the risks you're willing to take and deal with the results. Basing the majority of your business on search result ranking is low cost (unless you pay an SEO expert $35k which would have been better spent elsewhere, like real advertising, or a new car, or a 35,000 cheeseburgers from a fast food value menu) but high risk due to the constant changes.
have good content, based on keyword analysis, that people value, keep it current, organize your content properly, lay out your titles and page content strategically and accuraterly and you'll do fine on any search engine, try to game 'em, they'll get ya...
it ain't rocket surgery...
dB Masters
I used to have a site reviewing free web page hosting, back in the '90s when that was a relatively new idea. I had a form where people could suggest sites, and every weekend or so I'd go check them out, try setting up a sample page, and add the results to the list.
All of a sudden, over a period of a couple of months or so, the "request" page started getting flooded with suggestions for "new" free web hosting sites that seemed awfully similar, and offers to exchange links, and what in retrospect were obviously the work of the kinds of parasites that Google's been fighting. Pretty soon maintaining the page wasn't fun any more, and I quit updating it and eventually took it down.
Given that Google has to automate this process, I think they're doing a pretty good job.
The searcher is their customer, NOT the "small business owner".
That's not even close to true. Your customers are, without fail, the people that pay you (or at least, the people you're trying to convince to pay you). Searchers are Google's product; advertisers are Google's customers.
This is no different (in this respect) than radio and ad-supported television: your listeners/viewers are the product you sell to your advertisers.
Don't ever think that Google wants to make you, the searcher, happy - they want to make their advertisers happy. If the best way to do that is by making you happy (and so far, it pretty much has been), then lucky for you. If it isn't, tough cookies: you're not the one keeping the cooling on.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
It's not a fair assessment to assume companies want "to game the system" by hiring SEO "experts". Most of my web clients know NOTHING about making a web page, so they know even less than nothing (like -nothing!) about getting listed in search engines. Alot of them would hire an SEO agency in complete innocence, thinking they are just setting up their site to conform to what the search engines need in order to "get listed".
NO! Gaming the system is the same as killing babies. And not just ugly babies, cute babies!
Just kidding (do I really have to say that?) Serious question though:
Searching for "mysolitaire" fetched 0 results. Searching for "link:mysolitaire.com" brought about 5 results, one of which was http://directory.iserv.com.au/?sub=Jewellery&in=bu siness_shopping which looks link-farmish to me. The weird thing is that 5 minutes later I searched the same phrases and received 28.9k and 0 results, respectively, and a AdSense ad for MySolitaire. Wtf? Has anyone else had something like this happen?
You misunderstand slightly.
Companies which pay Google to place advertisements are Googles customers.
Companies which do not pay Google for advertisements are not Googles customers.
Random people looking for websites are not Googles customers either.
In order for googles adverts to be productive people have to visit websites, if they visit a website which actually matches with the sort of website they were looking for then googles adverts are more powerful.
Anyone gaming googles system to drive people to their websites without taking account of whether this is the best website matching the surfers requirements is hurting googles customers by not maximising the effectiveness of the audience for their adverts.
This is the sort of person the Forbes's article was aimed at.
How's that for a hidden insult!
(1) it shrinks their spider's workload
(2) if they want to sell adwords, they can disappear sites who don't buy adwords. My site, for example, is the largest repository of baby names on the 'net, but when you type in "baby names" you won't find it. I put it down to my not buying adwords, where plenty of other baby name sites do (they typically have 300 to 500 times less names, yet rank higher).
No wonder the GH process is shrouded in secrecy...
I come here for the love
visited the site ss
The site has a Secret Service?
Have you read my journal today?
$500,000 is a lot of money. But is a loss of $500,000 more significant for a diamond-retailer or a baseball-card retailer? Granted $500,000 is $500,000, but when I saw what type of business realized that drop -- a business in which a single sale can be $5000 and more -- it seemed to me it would be much more significant for a company where a single sale is more in the $500 range.
I wonder if the writer used the most extreme example they could find, but one that doesn't amount to very much?
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
I READ THE INSTRUCTIONS AT GOOGLE FOR WHAT TO DO AND WHAT NOT TO DO AND I FOLLOWED THE RULES If you simply follow the rules that google lays out, you won't get sucked into google hell. If you try and game the system by paying for consultants to "juice" your site, you gambled and lost.
While I see you mean with trying to "game" the system, these guys are a bit of a straw-man. Why? Sure, they tried to "game" the system. But there are many of us who don't, and have been arbitrarily hurt. Possibly because we did nothing, instead of following Google's "rules". Pardon my french, but when the fuck did Google get to set how sites are made? Answer: when they became the Microsoft of the internet.
I help run a site for car enthusiasts. We've been around since the mid 1990's. Remained fairly strictly non-commercial. We have mailing list archives stretching back that far, that are a treasure-trove of useful information. We use Google's branded search. And one day, we noticed that the branded search wasn't returning many results. We tried exactly the same search on the main google page using "site:____.com". We got ten times the results. Huh?
Then one day, people started to complain that they couldn't find recent posts. We looked in the logs; Google was crawling the site, but we did a dozen searches for specific posts and couldn't find any of them past a certain date. Google simply binned us.
I filled out the "contact us" form, and didn't get anything more than a form reply telling me to take a long walk off a short pier and stop complaining about how we didn't like our search positioning. We didn't give a shit about where we appeared in searches. We just wanted to get current content indexed, period.
Please help metamoderate.
Okay, there are 17000 small businesses in the US selling diamonds and jewelry. How do you get them all to fit in the first page of search results?
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Looks like google's search algorithms worked perfectly, he tried to game the search engine results and
got sent to the black hole.....
No sympathy here!
Got Code?
a 500.000$ drop is meaningless without knowing how large their revenue was before. If we're talking billions, it's insignificant, if we're talking single digit millions or less then you may have a valid complaint.
The problem is not with google. The problem is with a bad website redesign by unknowledgeable people that do not understand how search engine placement occurs.
Cached url's can be kept functional through the use of apache re-writes and many other web tools. For example, when I was commissioned by a client of mine to redesign a web application critical to their business from one technology platform to something completely different, I made extensive use of the apache re-write module. Even though all their old urls no longer existed, I took the extra time of a good redesign to forward every pre-existing url to its new url equivalent. The end result was improved functionality of the new applicaton and better search engine placement without the loss of the cached urls during the sometimes lengthy search-indexing transition.
A company that is that dependant on web sales from search engines should have paid the small amount extra to make sure old urls remained functional. Fire the person who grossly messed up and next time hire better people.
A famous quote appropriate to the diamond company's situation... "God is in the details."
The diamond company got sloppy.
BOOO FUCKING HOO!
You dont fucking have a right to be on Google, or to make a profit. So excuse me if I dont fucking shed a tear that you didn't make as much money as before.
I think the article gives a great big hint why Skyfacet ended up on the supplemental index. First the article says "Google's programmers appear to have created the supplemental index with the best intentions. It's designed to lighten the workload of Google's "spider," the algorithm that constantly combs and categorizes the Web's pages. Google uses the index as a holding pen for pages it deems to be of low quality or designed to appear artificially high in search results.". Then it goes on later to say "In retrospect, Sanar thinks he can trace his problem to a search marketing consultant he had paid $35,000 to improve Skyfacet's Google rankings. He now believes the consultant mistakenly replicated content on many of the site's pages, making them look like duplicate--that is, spam--content.". So, basically, the site owner paid an SEO type to try to game Google's system, Google saw it and dropped his site in the trash along with the rest of the bogus sites, and now he's wondering how to get out of the trash. Well, I guess he'll just have to abandon attempts to game the system and wait until Google re-spiders his site and sees it's no longer playing tricks. Yes, that might take a while. That's the price you pay for trying to get cute and getting caught at it.
7) Offer just such a service to dumb people ...
8) Blackmail them
9)
10) Profit!
That't the damn trouble with dealing with dishonest people - you just can't trust 'em...
It's true. They are in a losing battle with the web spammers who are developing an artificial intelligence based system that will make it so Googlebot won't be able to tell the good stuff from the bad, and if that weren't enough they ignore spam reports, and bury the reporting mechanism so deep that nobody wants to be bothered to report it anyway.
What this will mean is that we'll be on a user-ranking system like Digg or the like since the users can vote a topic down if it's spam and it gets buried almost immediately(well within a couple hours as compared to days/months/years) but since Google isn't prepared for that type of system, they will soon find themselves overwhelmed with spam.
I have at least one site that was permanently delisted by Google for some unknown violation and yet I get just as much traffic without them as I did with them. I don't think they're evil nor am I against them but if they don't wake up soon they're going to lose this game, not to Yahoo or other search engines, but to the spammers themselves.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Yes, but remember that Google's product has one unique trait: it has legs. Google's product, people running searches, want to find relevant results. Relevant by their criteria, not by the criteria of the sites being found or those buying ads. If they don't get relevant results, they'll stop using Google and then what's Google going to sell? So Google does have to consider the desires of it's product when making decisions. In fact, it has to give it's product more weight than it gives any one customer. If it doesn't, it won't have a product to sell.
I agree. It's not like Jewelers aren't pushing an entirely created market, anyway - and one with blood on it's hands. When the diamond industry stops killing Africans (and, I'm sorry, "Less than 1% of our diamonds are blood diamonds!" is simply not good enough) and comes up with a good reason that their earth-grown diamonds are better than cool synthetically grown ones, I'll start to feel pity for them.
[Ego]out
Er...isn't that what I said? The people who pay Google are Google's customers. Keeping their customers happy is Google's goal. It so happens that the best way to keep their customers happy is to keep their product - searchers - happy, so everyone wins.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Does this also mean that you can "game" the sites of your competitors to get them into Google hell?
Exactly -- I'm surprised this hasn't come up more.
It seems that if I want to deep-six your site, which might mean your entire business and/or livelihood, all I need to do is find the most inept link spammer I can, and pay him a pittance to whore your site's URL all over the place, on tons of spamblogs and Viagra pages. All of a sudden, Google will notice, can your page off of the search results, and you're hosed.
I've got to imagine that this has already happened; heck it seems like a fairly good extortion scheme: pay us or we'll linkfarm you until Google notices and your competition slaughters you. It's like SEO, only in reverse.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
since you can eventually get out.
Google may be popular, but it has some problems. For example, they've totally messed up their handling of Something Awful - if you Google a Something Awful article or section name, you'll typically get blogs and forums referencing it, and even links to proxied versions of the relevant page, but the actual page is buried where you'll never ever find it. The pages are in the index, and you can (sometimes) find them by searching just the site, but Google's ability to select the relevant pages in this case is messed up and apparently has been for years.
Man, you really need that seminar!
...do not pass Go(.com) and do not collect $200.
Additionaly, you may visit Google Hell with no penalty, but you must route all traffic through the 'Just Visiting' proxy.
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable Slashdot 2.0.
I don't feel sorry for those diamond encrusted clowns. They decided to screw around to jockey up their Google rating and it backfired. They deserve every bit of their current Google state.
time and again on /., we have evidence of the insipid nature of Googles supposed vaunted technology. /. realizes that MS is no longer the enenmy, and google is, the better.
Google is NOT a good technology, it is NOT a good thing for the web, it is the new MS$, and the sooner that
It is a true measure of h ow incompetant the highly paid ceos of othe software companys are that they can't exploit this
I predicted, last year, that as google becomes a real biz that has to compete, all the "fun" stuff for neerds, like math appreciation, will be dropeed in favor of marketers (and gates wonders why he can't find programmers)
All rise to say a prayer for the damned.
Our search engine, Who art in California
Defined in the dictionary be Thy Name;
Thy profits come,
No evil be done,
in China as it is in the US.
Give us this day our daily hits,
and forgive us our gratuitous links,
as we forgive those who gratuitously link on our sites;
and lead us not into porno,
but deliver us from evil. Amen.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I'd take another look at my contract with the SEO - did they promise more hits?
If I paid them to INCREASE my hits and they (hits) DECREASED I'd sue them for a return of my money. Now if they didn't make any promises then there is no recourse.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Also, why aren't we hearing the stories from those that benefited briefly while this asshat was being penalized? What if they had to go spend extra money on infrastructure to support the increased volume and then suddenly the volume went away because said asshat fixed his google-karma? His little stunt may have hurt a few smaller businesses!!!
These guys should ask a lot of these shareware sites how they get so high in Google rankings. I swear, every time I try to discover new freeware software by doing Google searches, I have to wade through piles of dung. Even adding "+freeware -shareware" and such doesn't help much.
1) Create automated system which 'accidentally' blacklists honest sites obstensibly to relieve load on Google spider 2) ??? 3) 'Google Professional Services' analyzes 'honest' site for problem areas, provides personalized recommendations to 'honest' site's webmaster about what changes are necessary to stay out of blacklist. 'GPS' marks 'honest' site for immediate 'reindexing.' Assuming GPS recommendations were followed, site moves out of blacklist quickly. 4) Profit!
I have both the .com and .co.uk of the same domain for my site... they both point to the same location in the apache config (with or without the www) as I uk business I simply want to cover both of the most common options for my customers.
Is there any particular way I can make this set up as google friendly as possible?
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
Your advice sounds logical and well thought out. But what are you basing it on? Your own understanding of how the Google search algorithm works? The details of that algorithm are a closely-held secret. I'm skeptical of any claim to have reverse-engineered Google's algorithm without analysis of a substantial fraction of search results. We're talking millions of web sites! Somehow, I don't think you've done that.
The whole idea of a "Google Hell" is really just an artifact of perception. Take this diamond merchant at the beginning of the Forbes article. (Note to Forbes.com: intrusive video ads are not a good way to attract traffic!) He wants to know why he no longer comes out on top in searches for "diamonds" — but it doesn't occur to him to ask why he came out on top in the first place. My answer to both questions? Pure blind luck.
Take the thousands of people trying to sell diamonds on the web. Add the millions of people linking them in web sites. Add Google's search algorithm, which (however it works) considers not just the popularity of the one guy's site, but the popularity of the folks who link to him, and so on. Put these things together, and what do you have? A huge, highly unpredictable system. One good word for it is "whimsical". A year ago, this particular guy had a top spot in Google's search results. Before him, somebody else did. Now somebody else does. Call it the Andy Warhol effect.
Throw a lot of random events at people, and they'll try to perceive patterns in them. Sometimes the patterns people see are real, but more often they see nonsense. That's why science is as much about verification through experiment as it is about theory. And when it comes to "explaining" Google results, I see a lot of theory, but very little verification.
Maybe, instead of saying the poster doesn't understand what RTFA stands for, you could actually enlighten them by explaining that RTFA means [R]ead [T]he [F]antastic [A]rticle. You can substitute the [F] for any word of your choice.
Forbes, being one of the 'premier' business 'rags, the real story isn't what Google's actions. It's the spin that Forbes is trying to create. The real thing to learn from this is that Google is still unpopular in the Forbes reading circle.
Forbes is just trying to put some negative publicity onto Google any way they can. As many have already pointed out, no sane business model relies entirely on the search results from another business that has no vested interest. Anybody working at Forbes knows as much, and yet we have an article talking about "Google's gulag".
The real information here is from in between the lines. A power struggle behind the scenes, currently Google is the target of some negative image campaigning. What I'm interested in is, where that pushing originates. Who 'owns' Forbes and is pushing for bad press for Google?
That's not even close to true. Your customers are, without fail, the people that pay you (or at least, the people you're trying to convince to pay you). Searchers are Google's product; advertisers are Google's customers.
In either case, the company in question was not an advertiser. They were a business taking advantage of Google's free service. In that light, they are neither customer nor product. They were a freeloader looking to game the system and they got what was coming to them.
I knew some idiot fanboy would find a way to blame Microsoft. Congratulations on being that idiot.
I already know where to buy good stuff and just go directly to the store, which I found from friends or reading online blogs, magazines.
I'm so tired of Consumegle
Lane Myer: I have great fear of tools. I once made a birdhouse in woodshop and the fair housing committee condemned it.
Yes, Google is entitled to their own opinions. But their opinions are stupid (in my opinion at least!). Forget the TFA for the moment where we know they hired a consultant. What stops random people from intentionally using shady sites to link to reputable sites without their knowledge? People already are immature enough to pull Google bombs, this could be the next prank.
Somebody should have thought of this sooner. If there was some standard for semantics on web pages then there wouldn't be the need to game the system as much. I wonder if the W3C has any working groups to fix this? That Tim guy knows a lot about the web, maybe he can help.
If you have a lot of high quality backlinks then I think Google would be smart enough to ignore the low quality backlinks that don't affect your score much. They don't have to punish you for links. They can ignore them. If you have few to no quality backlinks then a bunch of spam sites linking to you would maybe have more of an affect. Google would assume then that your site sucks and you're trying to game the system.
I was highly backlinked by spam sites after a bunch of bots ran through the fields of my DMOZ mirror. My rank in Google went way up.
I got into Google Hell for not doing a proper redirect from an old domain. I basically flooded the new domain with traffic from old unrelated sites that had gone under from a server crash. About 6 months later I was back out. I don't have nearly the traffic but I still rank decently.
Google is not stupid. They're going to take a lot of factors in before punishing you. I imagine this clown did a cocktail of stupid things and rightfully ended up hosed.
Work Safe Porn
Well, guess he learned a lesson, didn't he?
Paid someone to mess with Google's search ranking to make them appear higher in the list, and *gasp* Google's spider figured it out and plopped them even lower in the index.
Boo hoo hoo.
Perhaps he should have looked through the various articles online which says that Google doesn't like tampering with their pagerank process and what happens to people who do insist on doing it.
Brielle
On the other hand, if Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL all think your pages aren't interesting, maybe they ... aren't interesting.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What would happen to Google's ranking of the site that I support, if I put a link to http://coastguardaux.us/ every time I sent a reply to slashdot ?
There's a lot more philosophy at stake here than people may realise. Ask yourself this: When you use a search engine, what results do you want to see? That is a complex question, partly because the answer changes from search to search.
If I want to buy some fly fishing gear, I might search for "fly fishing equipment." Pretty straightforward, but the search engine has to decide whether I want to learn about the equipment, read reviews of specific items, or find retailers to buy from. If I then search for "Berkley fly rods," the engine has to make the same decision, and also has to throw in the possibility of the manufacturer's website. The trick is that I'm more likely to be looking for retailers with the second search than the first, so they should be given more prominence in the results.
All well and good, but (a) trying to build this logic is tricky, and (b) companies benefit greatly by landing high on the list for any and every remotely relevant (and in some cases, even totally irrelevant) search. Therefore, companies try hard to get their name up on the list as often as possible, and google (and other search engines) try to present a useful set of results.
The question comes down to this: Who is the search engine company beholden to? They're making money by selling advertising to companies, so they don't want to deliberately censure them; however, advertising is only as effective as the number of potential customers, so they want to maximise exposure--by providing the best results to the customer. Ultimately, companies and consumers are at odds about what constitutes the "best" results, and google has to sit in the middle, acting as gatekeeper.
Having a neutral algorithm that tries to minimise companies' attempts at gaming the system is a good system. They can use it to back their 'useful results' ideal, and avoid having to beat down companies directly, risking revenue.
In short, this guy paid too much money to a scammer masquerading as a consultant, and is paying the penalty for it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
.... you need a new business plan.
Be a popular resource on the web and you'll get indexed with no fuss. In fact, it could become a problem.
I had a site that was, in a word, unmaintained. I didn't care, it was simply a file repository for certain wiring diagrams that I tended to reference, and I didn't make any effort to promote or hide the links. So what eventually happened, is that certain Google searches put my personal website high on the list, and I started getting traffic to my website, and with that came large logfiles, voluminous spam, and frequent "offers" to buy my domain name (although the offers never specified a price the person was willing to pay, so I simply ignored every single one of them.)
Occasionally I would write back and say "how much are you going to offer."
Finally, someone came back with a number, and I sold them the domain name. It's "searchportal.information.com" now, and I get a certain amount of amusement in the fact that the thing that I had linked there, which was of interest to nobody but myself as far as I was concerned, is the top link on that particular search page. Of course it leads nowhere but other spammy links.
It never occurred to me that people would want to intentionally increase their ranking. I always wanted ways to decrease mine. Ended up selling the domain name for a nice wad of cash, because the traffic it was generating was a problem.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
By using an extremely small font?
Apparently you skipped that part.
"Listen - I made you and I can break you just as easily - I'll pull your plug out"
Seriously: it's not Google's responsibility to give these people free marketing. In fact, maybe the thing Google should do is scramble their results slightly for commercial sites so that different businesses get a chance. A $3m/year jewelry business really shouldn't be anywhere near the top of Google searches anyway.
...and which therefore have fundamentally parasitic business models and deserve to disappear, every last one of them.
They are predatory capitalists and they care nothing about providing useful search results, only profitable results.
Small businesses need not apply.
Mom an Pop are just screwed because they can't afford to play/pay the google game.
The whole world has been brainwashed into accepting google as THE search engine.
Boo on google. I've banned access to any and all google sites, links, ads, products, services, holdings, child companies, etc through my LAN. Put a machine on my lan and try to access google and you'll get a nice "access denied" error page..
Anything BUT google.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but me, my lovely wife, P'zaz, our son, P-dawg and little baby Paashavimochaka absolutely do not like where you're heading with this...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Most of the time people put themselves into google hell by trying to mess with google to get it to think more highly of their sites than what is deserved through hard work and respect in a community.
If you are in google hell you most likely deserve what you get.
People who hire companies to increase their standing and are put into google hell for their efforts DESERVE TO BE THERE!! Say hi to Satan and his good friend Sadammn for me.
Don't pick such a poor business model that you rely on PAGERANK for your business. Ig'nt fool.
Strikes me as a game with no future in it. Extortion, on the other hand, might be profitable if you're the type who can get away with that successfully.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What's funny is that now the act of linking is viewed as a hostile act which people think that they can stop through cease and desist letters?
Such letters are often just bluff, but I'd love to hear the reasoning they would give in an actual lawsuit. That the linker was guilty of sending an A tag to somebody's browser and the broswer displayed it as colored, underlined text that goes to a certain site?
This all goes back the weird idea that you have to get somebody's permission before you link to them, and also the funny business in some fine print where they supposedly give you permission to link to them.
It amazes me how many people responded to this post that really dont have a clue.
1. Businesses are forced to rely on Google.
A company starts getting traffic from Google. They need resource to fill these orders. Thus as soon as they hire that resource they are dependant on that Google traffic to keep staff hired. These staff were only hired to meet demand that Google provided. It is not a choice, unless they say no to sales from Google.
2. Dont Blame the consultants.
It is very possible the consultants did nothing wrong. It is likely they did nothing but a) optimise the site and b) found reputable and relevant links into the site. Google is very strict now. If you get too many links (of any quality) into your site at once you get a penalty. If you make too many changes to your site at once, you get a penalty. It is more than likely that the consultant got too many links in at once.
3. Dont Blame the company.
To say the company is to blame for trying to game Google is not true. Do you think amazon or ebay or any of the big players dont spend a huge budget making sure that Google continues to give them love. This company was simply trying to make the next logical step.
Obviously we dont have all the facts here. Speculation is pointless.
are belong to Google?
Google search is not for marketing. It's purpose is to help people find information, not advertising. The first page should include things like the wikipedia entry on diamonds, and maybe some information about DeBeers and blood diamonds. It should not in almost all cases include any sales pages at all.
All is not lost, though, you scum sucking bastards. Google has put aside space for you to purchase where you can hawk your gaudy crap. Stop being tightwads, and pay for it like good little capitalists.
Google search is a tool for finding information. That's it. It has absolutely nothing to do with your or anyone else's business.
Google AdWords is a tool for promoting your business. Pony up some cash or shut the fuck up.
As some people here have mentioned, web pages can get into "Google hell" by being referred to from unrelated sites. Web pages can get a spam penalty for sitting next to a viagra site.
So, can't I just buy links for my competitor's website, on a site that links to various spam/viagra sites?
If its so easy to crash into Google Hell and so hard to get out, isn't it too abuseable?
If links from "bad" sites can torpedo your google rank, I'm really surprised that we haven't heard about people getting blackmailed to keep them off the "bad" sites.
One good way for him to get his site out of Google Hell might be to post an article about 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
If Google is wrecking businesses and there is no civilized way to get remedy for being wronged, sooner or later someone will grab an Avada Kalashnikova and visit Google HQ, taking many with him to the afterlife. Shooting rampages are the typical american solution under God, the sacred way to act according to individualism and 2nd amendment, cornerstones of the Land of the Brave.
I think Google better implement reasonable remedy policies with humans in charge of the process, in order to prevent frustrated and financially wrecked businessmen choose the utmost solution. Nothing can cost more than paying several million USD perc capita to families of your slain employees.
Don't do evil and don't force others to do evil against you!
You're as visible as people want you to be. Business has no intrinsic right to anyone's attention. Lots of people give it to google because they don't abuse it by throwing up garbage like these complainers.