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.'"

Comments

My tips on Google penalties

[DeadSea]

My tips for staying out of Google Hell.

• 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:

• There is nobody at Google you can talk to.
• Fix any issues that you can find.
• Contemplate. Google hell is designed as a penalty box. However it can whack the white hat folks just the same. You may be in it because you did something wrong, you may just have gotten hit by friendly fire. It happens from time to time to most large sites that depend on Google for traffic.
• Wait. You will generally get out of Google hell. In my experience it can be as little as one to two months for most things, but up to a year for domain name changes
• Get the PR machine going. Google doesn't want a bad image. If you get artitles like this one in places that Google engineers are likely to see them, the problems may get fixed for you faster. Google will still never admit that there ever was a problem though.

Re:My tips on Google penalties

[eriklou]

Google seams to have a back end now for people to control some search stuff for their domains. I don't know if this is relevant or not but its an easy place to get Google to remove cached stuff. I recommend looking around in it and verification of a domain just includes uploading a blank file with a weird name.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps

Re:My tips on Google penalties

[lintux]

What's the problem with the domain name change? If you just make your web server send people to your new domain name using a correct forward (not 302 but 304 IIRC) everything should be fine. Worked for me about two years ago, at least.

Re:My tips on Google penalties

[iplayfast]

Here's another non-obvious tip. Don't get any sudden exposure.

My dad runs a stock expert tracking site stockchase that he was getting some small revenue from adsense on. He got some exposure from a major newspaper, and google canned the adsense. The only thing we can think of is the sudden jump made them suspicous, and my dad saw some ad's on the site that he was interested in, and clicked on.

We wrote to them, and got no answer. He has re-applied for adsense and they won't touch us.

It's one thing to do something wrong and be told don't do that or we will discontinue the service. It's another thing to discontinue the service and not be told the reason other then we were suspicous.

Re:My tips on Google penalties

[Bogtha]

my dad saw some ad's on the site that he was interested in, and clicked on.

This is against the Adsense terms and conditions, and they mention it in big, bold letters when you sign up, if I remember correctly. Forget the speculation about "sudden exposure", your dad broke the rules and was kicked out for it.

That's 35 grand poorly spent

[Vengeance]

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.

Marketing Consultant

[CmdrGravy]

after the site owner paid a marketing consultant to improve the sites

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.

Also, since it can be a web page design issue...

[Anonymous Coward]

...make sure your site doesn't suck.

Google Official Response

[cyberianpan]

The chief anti spam engineer of Google is Matt Cutts he says:

As a reminder, supplemental results aren't something to be afraid of; I've got pages from my site in the supplemental results, for example ... That statement still holds. It's perfectly normal for a website to have pages in our main web index and our supplemental index

MySolitaire.com, another online diamond business, spent January to June of 2006 in the supplemental index. Amit Jhalani, the site's vice president of search marketing, says he figures that cost his business $250,000 ... Okay, so the VP of SEM for this site mentions that they tried buying links; maybe those links started to count for less. I decided to check into mysolitaire.com and see if I could find any other links that might have started counting for less. I did find a spam report where someone forwarded an email that appeared to be from mysolitaire.com ... I checked out http://www.mysolitaire.com/resources/ and by my count saw 329 different categories offered for link exchanging: And the fix:

The approach I'd recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).

Re:Google Official Response

[DeadSea]

Matt Cutts maintains a blog where he responds.
Here is the link to this particular response:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-hell/

From Google's Webmaster Help Section

[coolmoose25]

For those that think perhaps that Google didn't warn people about disreputable SEO services...

Don't feel obligated to purchase a search engine optimization service. Some companies claim to "guarantee" high ranking for your site in Google's search results. While legitimate consulting firms can improve your site's flow and content, others employ deceptive tactics in an attempt to fool search engines. Be careful; if your domain is affiliated with one of these deceptive services, it could be banned from our index.

Re:Play By The Rules

[Ajehals]

Yup - Agree 100%.

My personal check-list for this kind of thing is..

1) Make sure that the site design is sensible and contains valid html + valid css. (if used)
2) Make sure that all the text is relevant and not overly complex for the sake of it. (nice clear simple language..)
3) Have a site map. (A normal one - I don't know if google sitemaps, i.e. the xml stuff you can add to your site are useful)
4) Use all the useful meta information, (description, abstract etc..) ...But don't duplicate content or meta information for no reason (500 random key words really wont help you)
5) Make sure that the links on site (internal and external) are valid and go where you think they should ...But don't have link page upon link page to random sites
6) If you use a CMS or any content generation (i.e. data driven sites) make sure that the generated page addresses are neat, rewrite them if neccessary (possible). www.whatever.com/about.html is better than www.whatever.com/generated/pages/index.php?page=ab out&theme=pretty&data=-1&uid=14568681.
7) Update the content on your site on a regular(ish) basis.

8) Never ever let an SEO company that claims it an get you X hits per day/month anywhere near it, most SEO techniques involve gaming search engines in one way or another, whether through comment spam, blog spam, dodgy link farms or other nefarious methods. If an SEO company comes to you and says it will look at the layout/content of your site to optimise it to your sites demographic (by cleaning up the language or the code) you should be golden, anything else is a disaster waiting to happen. You should launch your site expect a few visitors and if it is a useful and usable site, then your user base will find it, as they find it, the links and traffic will come naturally.

One quirk that I noticed a while back whilst writing a company site that listed news headlines from a couple of news agencies, was that the site was appearing in conjunction with some weird search terms, like "$companyname terrorists" and "$companyname organised crime". Its not just the search terms you want to be associated with that will work - but anything that is available on your site, dynamic content and all.

AKA: The result of bad website redesign

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Really, it is Google Puragatory

[JackStraight]

since you can eventually get out.

Re:Must have happened already, right?

[psavo]

I'we gathered from Matt Cutts blog that the SEO penalizing won't occur unless you're hitting several barriers and not providing any 'value'.

So if you have relevant, wellformed (ie. indexable) content, don't linkexchange and only get shitloads of incoming spamlinks from farms and many links from legitimate (PR2+) sources then you most likely won't be hit.