Businesses Scramble To Stay Out of Google Hell 303
whoever57 writes "Forbes has up an article on the consequences of being dumped into a claimed 'supplemental index',
also known as 'Google Hell'. It uses the example of Skyfacet, a site selling diamonds rings and other jewelery, which has dropped in Google's rankings and saw a $500,000 drop in revenue in only three months after the site owner paid a marketing consultant to improve the sites. The article claims that sites in the supposed 'supplemental index' may be visited by Google's spiders as infrequently as once per year. The problem? Google's cache shows that Google's spiders visited the site ss recently as late April. 'Google Hell is the worst fear of the untold numbers of companies that depend on search results to keep their business visible online. Getting stuck there means most users will never see the site, or at least many of the site's pages, when they enter certain keywords. And getting out can be next to impossible--because site operators often don't know what they did to get placed there.'"
My tips on Google penalties (Score:5, Informative)
That's 35 grand poorly spent (Score:5, Informative)
Marketing Consultant (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds to me like they should have hired a more professional consultant, it seems to me thats who the company should immediately be blaming rather than Google.
Also, since it can be a web page design issue... (Score:1, Informative)
Google Official Response (Score:5, Informative)
From Google's Webmaster Help Section (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Play By The Rules (Score:5, Informative)
My personal check-list for this kind of thing is..
1) Make sure that the site design is sensible and contains valid html + valid css. (if used)
2) Make sure that all the text is relevant and not overly complex for the sake of it. (nice clear simple language..)
3) Have a site map. (A normal one - I don't know if google sitemaps, i.e. the xml stuff you can add to your site are useful)
4) Use all the useful meta information, (description, abstract etc..)
5) Make sure that the links on site (internal and external) are valid and go where you think they should
6) If you use a CMS or any content generation (i.e. data driven sites) make sure that the generated page addresses are neat, rewrite them if neccessary (possible). www.whatever.com/about.html is better than www.whatever.com/generated/pages/index.php?page=a
7) Update the content on your site on a regular(ish) basis.
8) Never ever let an SEO company that claims it an get you X hits per day/month anywhere near it, most SEO techniques involve gaming search engines in one way or another, whether through comment spam, blog spam, dodgy link farms or other nefarious methods. If an SEO company comes to you and says it will look at the layout/content of your site to optimise it to your sites demographic (by cleaning up the language or the code) you should be golden, anything else is a disaster waiting to happen. You should launch your site expect a few visitors and if it is a useful and usable site, then your user base will find it, as they find it, the links and traffic will come naturally.
One quirk that I noticed a while back whilst writing a company site that listed news headlines from a couple of news agencies, was that the site was appearing in conjunction with some weird search terms, like "$companyname terrorists" and "$companyname organised crime". Its not just the search terms you want to be associated with that will work - but anything that is available on your site, dynamic content and all.
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps [google.com]
Re:Google Official Response (Score:4, Informative)
Here is the link to this particular response:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-hell/ [mattcutts.com]
AKA: The result of bad website redesign (Score:2, Informative)
Cached url's can be kept functional through the use of apache re-writes and many other web tools. For example, when I was commissioned by a client of mine to redesign a web application critical to their business from one technology platform to something completely different, I made extensive use of the apache re-write module. Even though all their old urls no longer existed, I took the extra time of a good redesign to forward every pre-existing url to its new url equivalent. The end result was improved functionality of the new applicaton and better search engine placement without the loss of the cached urls during the sometimes lengthy search-indexing transition.
A company that is that dependant on web sales from search engines should have paid the small amount extra to make sure old urls remained functional. Fire the person who grossly messed up and next time hire better people.
A famous quote appropriate to the diamond company's situation... "God is in the details."
The diamond company got sloppy.
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:3, Informative)
Really, it is Google Puragatory (Score:2, Informative)
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:3, Informative)
My dad runs a stock expert tracking site stockchase [stockchase.com] that he was getting some small revenue from adsense on. He got some exposure from a major newspaper, and google canned the adsense. The only thing we can think of is the sudden jump made them suspicous, and my dad saw some ad's on the site that he was interested in, and clicked on.
We wrote to them, and got no answer. He has re-applied for adsense and they won't touch us.
It's one thing to do something wrong and be told don't do that or we will discontinue the service. It's another thing to discontinue the service and not be told the reason other then we were suspicous.
Re:My tips on Google penalties (Score:3, Informative)
This is against the Adsense terms and conditions, and they mention it in big, bold letters when you sign up, if I remember correctly. Forget the speculation about "sudden exposure", your dad broke the rules and was kicked out for it.
Re:Must have happened already, right? (Score:3, Informative)
I'we gathered from Matt Cutts blog that the SEO penalizing won't occur unless you're hitting several barriers and not providing any 'value'.
So if you have relevant, wellformed (ie. indexable) content, don't linkexchange and only get shitloads of incoming spamlinks from farms and many links from legitimate (PR2+) sources then you most likely won't be hit.