Google has you by the balls
What to do when google decides to hide one of your pages.
There you are, following the rules you have decided are true. Write good quality, unique content, generate a few backlinks and hey presto ! Your site will be found and rank in the search engines for the keywords you have targeted.
You are generating traffic (and income) then all of a sudden, wham! Traffic dries up. No search engine traffic. When you do a search for your pages, you discover – to your horror – that the pages in question are now buried in the search engines in the back of beyond on page 750+. They are still indexed, but do not appear in any search term. For no apparent reason. You didn’t pay for any links, you didn’t do any spamming, you didn’t do any plagiarisation and everything on the page, with the exception of the text in the Amazon capsules, is original.
So now what. It doesn’t take you long to discover that there is no way of contacting google and asking them about the problem. Advice varies from, “Well, you just didn’t get enough backlinks,” to “You have been penalized for duplicate content for the text in the Amazon capsules.”
Neither of which is acceptable.
These are the two pages in question:
And the only thing I can say about them is that this is a nasty shock when it happens to you. I spent hours wading through a bunch of webmaster’s forums to discover I hadn’t done any of the things one usually gets penalized for – like keyword stuffing, paying for links, or mis-tagging or any other “black hat,” techniques.
So, what’s the answer? A glitch in the algorithm, you will just have to create some more backlinks and wait. Great. It is things like this that make you realize you are at google’s mercy. If they screw up – you pay. Simple as that. Caveat Emptor. 
Written by Mark Knowles from Mark KnowlesPosted on April 8th, 2008 and filed under Search Engine Optimisation
Do not forget to subscribe to our RSS feed for updates
7 Responses to “Google has you by the balls”
Author comments are in a darker gray color for you to easily identify the posts author in the comments
Trackbacks
Comments are closed.
Comments are closed since this post is older than 30 days. However, you can continue this discussion in our popular Blogging Forums
Sponsors
Blogging Tips Newsletter
Sign up to the Blogging Tips Newsletter for Free today and get a free ebook!
Webmaster Corner
A collection of top Wordpress themes, Web hosting and resources available to web site owners.
|
It seems these days that google will sometimes penalize websites having you wondering what you did wrong… and if you try to follow up with them, they are usually too busy to look into it so they will respond with a generic answer that doesn’t really tell you anything…
Been there, seen it, done it, got the T shirt. Only one option – wait and see.
google is always in a constant process of indexing millions of pages. so i guess, the SERPs are always affected. do whatever u may but google will not admit its shortcoming.
Too true. On mistake on their part and you are losing money. Response – “Too bad.”
I am learning.
if u have noticed, when u type in a search item(say MUSIC) in the search box, the result page displays the stats as to how many millisecs it took and how many results(2,190,000,000 is wat it shows) r related tot it. but beyond the 50th page it doesnt go furthur. per page its 10 results. so in effect we r left with 500 results. so what about other 2189999500 results or web pages? mind boggling. aint it?
Scary too.
Google always rights itself when pr update is done its hassle waiting though