How I got out of the Google dog house
Well, after almost four months, it looks like SwollenPickles.com could finally be out of the Google dog house. You can read up on the beginning of the saga here. In summary, up until earlier this week, you had to filter through around five pages of search results for "swollen pickles" before you'd find a link to this site. Prior to August/September SwollenPickles.com ranked number one for "swollen pickles" in the Google search results.
What did this mean? Well, the organic Google traffic effectively dried up, going from 200+ visitors a day down to 5-10 visitors a day. Not great, but fortunately I hadn't been relying solely on Google for my traffic.
Today I decided to see if anything had changed. Typing "swollen pickles" into the Google search box and hitting search, I was a little surprised to see SwollenPickles.com back at number one.
So after four months in the wilderness how did I find my way out? Since I have not received correspondence from Google at any point during this process I can only speculate. But here are the actions I took following my slapping.
1. Removed Text-Link-Ads from SwollenPickles.com - they were never a big earner for me anyway so I figured it was a trade-off between $10 a month and an extra 200 visitors a day. Obviously I went for the visitors.
2. Removed the PayPerPost tools code from my footer.php file - my theory was if Google was penalizing sites using PayPerPost then having PayPerPost code in my footer file would have raised an instant red flag at Google HQ.
3. Eased off on the PayPerPost opportunities - the number of opportunities I've taken on this site has really tailed off, partly due to the Google issues, but largely due to the quality of opportunities in conjunction with my disappointment with their turnaround time on approving a couple of posts. Long story short, took 29 (out of the 30 days) to review the post, only to have it rejected without payment. My argument was that since it had been live for 29 of the 30 days I should have at least received a pro rata payment of 97% of the total fee, seeing as it had been live for 97% of the total term. Anyway, that's another story...
4. Filed a reinclusion request via Googles webmaster tools - I never received a response from this, so I'm not sure whether I contributed to getting back in or not.
So maybe it was just one of those things, or maybe all four, that got me back where I belong. Who knows?
Overall, I'd say I'm happy things appear to be going back to normal in terms of search results, but I'm disappointed in the way Google seemed to handle the situation. At no time did I receive any notification of what I'd done to be slapped, and I received no response to any of my emails. But I guess that's what happens when one company basically holds a monopoly, or stranglehold, on the market.
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p.s. For those not interested in Google, my apologies, check out some sketches of the Mitsubishi Concept-RA that is set to break cover at the Detroit Motor Show.
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I had the same problem, except it was only one page that went from an average of 40 views a day to about 3… I thought it had to do with a paid text advertisement… I didn’t know that was against Google’s TOS, but apparently, it’s OK with them as long as you do a
rel=”nofollow”
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736
I didn’t know it was against their TOS until just now though… So I never did add that nofollow tag, but my traffic just jumped back up to normal for that page. Maybe they’re giving us warnings :O
I think I’ll go ahead and add the nofollow tags… Because although my traffic went back up for the page, the PR stayed down to ZERO for it! lol. I don’t want my page or the person who paid for the links page to get blacklisted.
The Big G saga continues. I do not think that any one had any thing about what was done. What everyone objected to is how it was done and is being done. There simply has not been any transparency nor any attempt at dialogue. G have lost a lot of goodwill which will cost them dear sometime in the future.
Maybe now is the time to switch over to one of those spicy search engines. For a while my blog (which was never really popular) turned up at page 3 on google. The blog name was my name!
I am just wondering if you were to guess which one played the biggest role in getting you back which would it be. Or do you think that it was possible you were always going to come back without any changes but Google just wanted to slap you on the wrist as kind of a warning?
If I had to pin point one thing, I’d say removing the PPP code from the footer.
Thanks for the quick reply, one more question. I just checked Yahoo and MSN for “swollen pickles” and you showed at number one. But when your rankings were low was Yahoo and MSN down as well or just Google?
Hmm… interesting! Google is fast becoming today’s Microsoft.
Matt – To be honest with you, I never noticed if my rankings dropped in Yahoo and MSN at the same time. I probably should have checked but didn’t think to at the time.
Shantanu – I think you’re right.