I have had a love affair with Google for many years, I use and love 99% of their tools and products. In fact, I think they must know more about me than my husband! Perhaps this has blinded me to the fact that not everything they do is so wonderful and fantastic. Maybe Google isn’t all sunshine and fluffy bunnies after all?
With all the apparent Google filters and penalties around, it has become a bit of a mine field being a webmaster these days. But that’s OK you think, I have nothing to worry about, I’ve built a decent site, good content and follow the guidelines…all will be well…or so I thought.
From what I can gather, It all started 90 days ago at All for Women and an accident with the .htaccess. Typos were made, and all blog pages redirected to the index. Stupid me didn’t realise till a few hours later, it was fixed up, and all was well. That was until the next morning, and every site owners worst nightmare..I discover that traffic is down by over 2/3 wtf? On closer inspection all high ranking keywords and phrases..gone..oh wait a minute, here they are allll the way back here, on page 6.
I was crushed, it is down right bloody depressing to see years of hard work down the drain in a matter of hours. What had I done, what was the cause? It would have been great if Google could have let me know why. When I was a kid, if I was being grounded, at least I would know why, and for how long.
My content is still being crawled daily and indexed. In fact a lot of the blog articles are index and rank on the first page within a few hours. Then magically get shoved on back to page 5, 6 or 7 within 24hrs.
I have nothing against filters and penalties, in fact I am all for them if warranted. But there really needs to be some transparency. Is it really fair that Google holds all the power to make or break a legitimate site without so much as a warning or an idea of the problem. Not everyone is an SEO expert and will have all the answers to be able to fix the problem. What maybe bleedingly obvious to some, is not to others.
I am not at all disputing there is a problem with my site, or that I am not guilty of something, I’m sure I am . But I have honestly run out of ideas as to what it could be. It obviously wasn’t any of the things I had originally thought, or I wouldn’t be still stuck in this bloody hole!
It has been suggested that it’s a waiting game, certain penalties last for a set period of time. But then others have reported having fixed some issues and submitting a re inclusion, the penalty is lifted soon after. How long do I wait?
Just recently Robin Good at MasterNewMedia was unfortunate enough to been given a similar penalty. Luckily for him, he was able to find the secret problem and his penalty was lifted after only a week. But there are many more at webmastersworld and around the net that are suffering from the same continuing problem. Aaron Wall has been posting a bit recently about problems with Google. It’s only the last few weeks I have found people really talking about it, 3mths ago when I first started looking into it, there was nothing.
I usually don’t like sharing my problems, or asking for help, but something needs to give. A huge reduction of traffic and revenue the last 3 months is really taking it’s toll. I can’t afford for it to continue, if it does, it may well send my site to the wall.
This site was my lively hood, I tried to play by the rules but it was squashed. How many other legitimate sites, that may have innocently made mistakes, have been axed without warning. Is anyone safe?
Where is my magical Matt Cutts fairy when I need it?
Did you ever get to the bottom of your penalty dilemma?
I can completely sympathise with your plight, having been in a similar situation for around a year, and still being none the wiser as to what the problem is.
It’s not fun at all and I think Google needs to do more to communicated with webmasters rather than just keeping them guessing.