Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Businesses Scramble To Stay Out of Google Hell

Posted by Zonk on from the argh-my-pancreas-the-demons-poke-it-so dept.

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.'"

7 of 303 comments (clear)

  1. My tips on Google penalties by DeadSea · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.
  2. That's 35 grand poorly spent by Vengeance · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  3. Marketing Consultant by CmdrGravy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  4. Google Official Response by cyberianpan · · Score: 5, Informative
    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).
    1. Re:Google Official Response by DeadSea · · Score: 3, Informative

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

  5. From Google's Webmaster Help Section by coolmoose25 · · Score: 3, Informative
    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.
    --
    Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
  6. Re:Play By The Rules by Ajehals · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.