Promotion Expert

Ok for a laugh i decided to checkout Google’s results after i have been using Yahoo for a fair while, and been extremely happy with the results.

This is the sort of junk that ranks above my site with 60,000 solid backlinks:

This garbage is nowhere to be found in the Yahoo results, seriously i feel like a brain dead moron for using Google for so long seeing the same old junk. I have never found more top quality websites with a search engine since using Yahoo, stuff that’s not in Google best commercial interests to display, just good sites with good quality content.

Yes that’s correct, Google sucks and i am fucking sick of their shit!

Sorry about the language, first time in 10 years i have sworn online but enough is enough. For some background you can read my post Impact of User Feedback and my About Me page. But the quick version, i had a website that was my sole source of income, it paid the bills getting xx,xxx unique visitors and $1,000 a day. A competitor sabotaged it by getting a ton of spam links to it with a tool called Xrumer, and Google culled my site from the search engines, re-inclusion requests were not read leaving me with no income.

I regrouped and built another website, and after a lot of hard work was doing well and earning me a living again. What i went through during that time was a living hell, months of sleepless nights spent trying to both to get my old site back to normal while building a new one because my future looked bleak and i literally could not afford to eat.

Well the website i built is now banned also, not only is it banned it’s not even cached any longer. A site: check in Google shows nothing, yet it had many thousands of pages indexed and many thousands of links to it even from places such as Yahoo and DMOZ directory.

Now you are probably thinking, well you just screwed up. No sorry, the site was powered by vBulletin forum software and also had vBSEO installed. With vBSEO it’s almost impossible to commit mistakes to make God/Google do what it has done.

All the URL’s were nicely formatted with no query strings, Page Titles, Descriptions and Keywords were handled by the software based on the page content so they are automatically highly relevant and spam free. All outbound links posted in posts and signatures were Nofollow, and the site had no Dofollow links on it anywhere and no there was no links/banners affiliate links etc sold on the site. Revenue was generated solely by Adcents. All links “to” the site were completely natural, i did not obtain links for it much like this one.

The site was checked by many SEO’s from both vBSEO and outside vBSEO, it was 110% compliant with God rules.

Gone, the site is not even indexed.

Either 2 things have happened, Google’s algo is indiscriminately taking out sites and is below par or my site posed a commercial problem because it ranked very well in a highly commercial area and i wasn’t buying Adwords with my Adcents money.

Right now i’m too wild to write anymore, yet again Google has screwed with my life and my only source of income is gone. I know one thing is for sure, Yahoo is my Homepage and i will never use another Google product or service again as long as i live.

Google are filthy scum.

Note: Please feel free to vote in my current Poll on the right

Offline, if someone sabotages our business which results in a complete loss of earnings and our sole source of income gone overnight typically we have some recourse in seeking damages. However with online business, and especially one’s which rely heavily on traffic from search engines such as Google if this happens we are virtually ruined.

The only official link between your problem and a solution lies in the form of a “Reinclusion Request” in which you have to bow your head in shame, admit wrong doing then click a button and wait hoping a stranger possibly on the other side of the planet is having a good day and has an ounce of compassion while your families livelihood is on the line.

What if that Email doesn’t even get read?

I’m doing a Poll on peoples opinion to see if they believe the Reinclusion Request even works. I’ve read many stories on forums and blogs of people hanging on with hope several months down the road, with great content sites completely tanked and everyone scratching their heads wondering why it doesn’t rank. One of them was even that good i bookmarked it because i knew i would never find it on Google.

I do not believe reinclusion requests are even read and here’s why:

I purchased i domain name from the TDNAM aftermarket, it was a perfect name for the site i wanted to build and i ran some basic checks such as looked it up on Archive.org, Google’d it to see if it was involved in spamming and so on and the only less than ideal red flag was that the domain wasn’t indexed but i figured no-biggie if it’s been 404 and/or parked recently that’s pretty normal.

I won the auction, excellent so i paid a designer to make me a unique design fully branded for my new domain and set about building content for it. A week later and with much lighter pockets i started uploading my new site, code, graphics and content found nowhere else on the net and it looked stunning.

I hand submitted it to several of the more reputable free directories, i wrote 3 unique articles and submitted them to Ezine Articles with my site link in the Bio. Shortly after i went away for 10 days due to a family problem, and when i returned the first thing i done was check it’s stats which were less than stellar. Googlebot had made 0 hits while Yahoo and MSN were in the 100’s, so i looked it up on Google and nothing i couldn’t be found.

Weeks went by, i put my link in a couple of forum signature i have visited for years and due to that a couple of people linked to me from their site referencing a particular article i done and one was even a Google Pagerank 7 so i figured i should be indexed soon surely.

More weeks went by and i realized i wasn’t going to be indexed, the domain was banned. I done some more checking using Yahoo and my domain had a link in the footer of a portal along with about 20 other similar domains, mine was say RedWidgets and they also linked to BlueWidgets, GreenWidgets and so on so i realized it must of been part of a network and was banned.

I tried to contact the portal site owner using the Whois address, and the contact form to ask him to remove the link but no reply.

I filed a reinclusion request, stating i bought the domain from a TDNAM auction and linked to the auction as it had the time and date the auction ended. I also linked to the Whois on DomainTools as it showed the last update on the domain and i also pasted in the TDNAM receipt details of the transaction.

I told them it’s never been indexed since i bought it, and i believe it was part of a network as it’s got a link on a portal with similar domains but despite a number of attempts i can’t get the link removed so could they please devalue or ignore that link somehow.

Well here we are 1 year later, my domain never did get indexed and i let it expire. A total of $700 in design down the drain and 100’s of hours writing content until my fingers started to bleed.

Nobody can tell me Google reads reinclusion requests, Googlebot didn’t visit the domain so there was clearly a problem before i purchased it. I provided ample “evidence” i was the new owner of the domain, and it was apparent to anybody a lot of work went in to the site and it was completely original right from the fully valid XHTML & CSS design to the content on the pages.

The other time i have used a reinclusion request, same thing nothing was done. You can read more about that under The Impact of User Feedback.

So please vote in my poll, what do you feel about reinclusion requests if you have filed one before? Feel free to comment if you also had a similar experience.

I just saw a post today over on the Google Webmaster Central Blog titled:

“The Impact of User Feedback Part 1″

In the entry it says:

Google reserves the right to take action on sites that buy or sell links that pass PageRank for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings

The Impact of User Feedback

Google reserves the right to take action on sites that “BUY” links, which appears exactly what has happened to my site that was my only source of income. Houston we have a problem and a massive loop-hole, i did not buy links to my site nor did i sell links on my site. In fact my site had probably one outbound link per 50 pages, the volume was that low.

It did however receive a number of low quality links in the lead-up to the ban, which i didn’t realize at the time because checking the number of links i had was something i rarely ever done.

The site was receiving an average of 15,000 unique referrals from Google per day, and climbing slowly day by day. I was so happy all the hard work was paying off, so happy in fact i quit my job to dedicate my life to my site and i even lashed out and bought a good quality dedicated server to support it’s growth.

Then the nightmare begun, at the end of January 2008 traffic from Google stopped instantly.. It didn’t drop day by day it completely stopped, terms i was ranking #1 for just 10 minutes ago i was now not in the top 1,000 results. I had completely vanished off the face of Google for everything except my domain name.

At first i thought it was a glitch with Google, and things would correct themselves shortly. I spent with no exaggeration 18 hours a day reading SEO Blogs, Articles, Official Google Documents and Forums for weeks and checked my site from head to tail dozens of times for everything imaginable including hidden text/links in case i had been hacked you name it. I even has SEO’s look over my site, all said it’s perfect it must be a glitch.

The one thing i did not check was the number of links pointing at my site, and where these links came from. I knew there were lots, over 100,000 the last time i checked weeks before the ban but as far as i was aware “Links pointing from Site A to Site B could not harm Site B”.

After 2 months pennyless with no income and bordering on Bankruptcy things still hadn’t come good, Google was still spidering my site to the tune of 2GB of bandwidth per month, all my pages were cached with recent dates but no traffic.

I checked through thousands of keywords and phrases i ranked first page for, and even for my unique page titles that were 10 words long and only had 300 results i was finding my pages that were Pagerank 5 and 6 back on the last page being outdone by “Splogs” and sites with “This Page May Harm Your Computer” loaded with Adsense and 5 backlinks total to their whole domain completely outranking me despite them only having a few of the 10 word phrase. (So much for returning the most relevant result for a query).

On to the backlinks, i spent a whole day hunting through backlinks and started finding nonsense comment spam, spam in guestbooks, links in identical looking blogs and all sorts of strange pages. I asked a number of people, “If i spammed my link in 1,000’s of places would my domain be banned from Google?” and most people said Yes most likely you will.

That was it, i had my suspicions so i went to Alexa and overlayed my traffic graph with my main competitor (Who happened to be a Premium Adsense Publisher) and the result was ouch! I had made a significant dent in his traffic, and after my ban my traffic took a massive dive and his shot up higher than before.

I showed these spam links to my site to an excellent SEO (Who’s ranked page 1 for the term “SEO”) and he said it looks like the automated tool Xrumer.

I checked it out and all i can say wow, this tool can make 40,000 links to a site overnight all for the sum of $450!

Ka-Ching! My competitor has bought this tool for less than 1 days revenue and run it against my site, then reported me to Google for link buying wiping me completely out of Google’s index.

So this is a warning: Google’s policy is a massive loophole, and i urge you to check your backlinks daily and if you notice a substantial increase in links check them and pray nobody has paid $450 to take you out.

If you think links to your site cannot harm you, then you are wrong and i’m sure you will start seeing many more stories like mine now Google has this “Wipe em” for something you have no control over policy. It pretty much ruined my life!

Their entry is “The Impact of User Feedback” so mine is about “The Impact of Their Actions from User Feedback”.

Sorry about the state of the site, i’m still unpacking the furniture.

When i was going through my files i found some notes about a search query i have reported to Google on more than one occasion, so i ran the query again today and nothing has changed it’s still intact. So given the lack of action i can only assume Google feels that the query is ok and relevant.

The query is simply “leads” as in computer leads, affiliate marketing leads etc. When conducting the query, three image results are displayed at the top of the SERP’s and here is a screenshot of the results.

Click the image to enlarge (No pun intended)

As you can obviously see, it returns with a fairly graphic image of a females genitalia.

Now maybe it’s just me, but i cannot for the life of me see why that is what a user would be attempting to find when searchings for leads. I can see the 14 year old kid next door looking for leads to connect up his Playstation or someone looking for leads for their business or maybe even someone looking for information on Leeds the location in the UK and spelling it incorrectly.. But to be presented with an explicit image directly in the search results for that query?

Google Search Setting

Also, it’s present with the Google Search Preferences set at default behavior which considering a lot of internet users don’t this setting exists or how to change it means it displays for the vast majority of internet users.

So the fact my reports to Google have done nothing, i can only assume Google Approves.

What are your thoughts, is this an ok and appropriate search result?

This is my test post!