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”.