Getting Fucked by Google p.2
 

I posted this on accident in another forum.

What can you do? Just move on?


Reconsideration request for XXXX: Site violates Google's quality guidelines
March 26, 2012 Dear site owner or webmaster of XXXX,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider XXXXX for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

I dont understand, did they send that email to you ?

If so,

Somebody literally dry bummed you.

nice way to fuck over your competition

Was thinking about that the other day.. what's stopping someone from pumping a shitty site that Google hates with traffic and using it to link their competition and ruin their SERPs?

nothing at all

I think someone was pissed and wanted to fuck the website.

Yep, :helpme

At least you got reply. All of my reconsideration request went nowhere.

happened to me before. reconsideration requests were ignored.

I had a site which was ranked 1st for the target term, earning me well over 1k/month, then BOOM one day it completely disappeared.

I didn't think much of it at first due to the nature of the beast. However with time the site did not resurface in the rankings so I did a bit of digging.

Some asshat had submitted hundreds of backlinks to negative sites, thus getting my site booted from the rankings. I did quite a lot of reading on the subject, and even a video by Matt Cutts says that this really should not even be possible and they have nothing in place to review it if it does indeed happen to you.

With this being a newer site of mine I did not have a track records of high quality backlinks so it made it that much easier for the asshole to knock me out of the rankings.

I have tried a number of things since but it seems the domain is doomed and I am done fucking with it.

I have never in my life used shady techniques against my competition. Fucking assholes.

Not sure why I am even posting this here (hopefully it doesn't give anyone else the idea).

INBOUND links do not count against you, only OUTBOUND links. We took this into consideration very early on, and I don't know of a policy reversal subsequently.

What is subject website has ZERO outbound links and only INBOUND links?:winkwink:

I used to operate on that assumption. For the simple reason that you have no control over the sites linking TO YOU.

In all honesty, we can never know how google ranks sites, we can only guess. And based on what I've seen happening over the past year and my own tests, I would now say that inbound links can harm you.

That is to say: I wouldn't worry about 1 or 2 strange sites linking to you, but a sudden surge in unnatural looking links does seem to raise some kind of red flag. A red flag that by itself may not be enough to lower your ranking but might add some weight to other red flags google may already have raised about your site.

It is not "on" accident it is by accident, and google I assure you awards demerit points of the hillbilly variety for that type of thing, alone.

While I was there, this was VERY important, for that exact reason. I don't see any reason for them to have changed that philosophy .. it'd open the door to too many evil acts.

You're right. Sites never get banned for link spam. Ever. Not even the OP's site. Thanks for your insight.

:2 cents:

Wrong, actually read the WMT message again, it was send out hundreds of thousands of times since february and is related to Google's crusade against blog networks. Inbound links can hurt big time, the good old times when only outbound links could fuck you over are long gone!

must have pissed off the wrong people (aka people working in the same niche)

Case Study #1 (MOST RECENT AND ONE OF THE BIGGER PLAYERS): buildmyrank.com/news/its-been-a-great-run

Case Study #2 (TO SHOW THAT THIS IS NOT A NEW CAMPAIGN): sparkplugging.com/sparkplug-ceo/i-should-have-kept-my-fricking-mouth-shut-or-google-cracks-down-on-the-mommy-bloggers/

According to other mainstream webmasters, many networks are being hit as well.

Both inaccurate statements.

Its totally bizarre that so many people who comment on SEO can't seem to understand that you can make almost any page tank for the phrases it ranks for with link spam.

People who think that's not possible know nothing about link building on any real scale as its been a problem and one of the most basic for many years.

You can go to any black hatter forum like Black Hat World and often at least 10% or more of the threads on the first page are some idiot asking the same question about why his page is gone for that pages phrase, is it banned etc. Its such an old and total n00b discussion.

Its been like this since maybe 2008 or 2009.

Yes, you can cause another persons page drop out of the SERPs for a phrase it ranks for by simply firing up scrapebox or xrumer or any other mass link building tool and hitting it with links with that phrase as the anchor.

Yes, unless that page is strong (age, quantity of legit inbound links, from where, their age/relevance etc), it will be gone and stop ranking for that phrase for 1-2 months or so. Initially, it was shorter periods... days, then weeks, now it seems that every time I push, it ends up being 8 weeks or so before that page comes back. The last site I cared about that I was building a moderate volume of links (blog comments, auto-blog creation with spun text, xrumer links etc) to for a few cam phrases dissappeared for at least 3 months for those phrases. Its just part of the game and much better than the domain being banned.

Yes, its something that black hatters deal with constantly.

Yes, its something people do to each other constantly.

No, Google doesn't give a fuck about you and your precious website. They care about their search results. Linkspam effects search results. It doesn't matter who is doing it... you or a competitor. Who is screwing with you is irrelevant to them and with trillions of pages indexed, your page is irrelevant as much as people think the earth should rotate around it their website.

No, you don't matter. No, your site doesn't matter. And even though people can cause a page of yours to drop out of the SERPs for a phrase it ranks for... no, this behavior does not even account for the tiniest measurable fraction of total pages indexed... so get over yourself and stop thinking you matter so much both to Google and to Netizens worldwide.

To be fair, this was actually true before say.. 2007-ish or so (and for some period leading up to this). When there was a penalty for linking to "bad neighborhoods" as Google put it - which like anything else they say, caused the creation of a retarded amount of myths when Google really just meant "when you're blog on blog.dolphins.com has 5000 outbound links to Cialis sites, there is a problem" and it wasn't anything really noticed by normal webmasters (however, you couldn't link a normal site to adult sites for some time before this without it dropping out of the SERPs).

At that time, either a domain was banned for link spam or not. There were no penalties for inbound links.

But obviously, he's trying to talk like he's a Google insider and clearly has no clue what he's talking about.

If you have any keywords one first page, doing $500+/day, hit me up. I might be able to get rid of a competitor or two for you, permanently. For a price, of course. ;)

To borrow from Sir Isaac Newton and his second law of gravity... "for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction". Most learn the hard way that starting down that path is rarely fruitful for anyone. ;)

Hehe, to borrow from the blackhat community... "Don't get busted". :)

You wanted to say how edgeprod is idiot with such a ignorant statement,but you explained it so nicely :winkwink: I could also add if you put link to non-relevant link you would be penalized too because then it look like you sold that link.

If their goal is to have relevant search results, these blackhat methods to push your competitor's site off the results page is just as bad, if not even worse, than methods to push your own site up in the results.

What can they do? I don't know, but they should care who is doing it if they care about accuracy of search results..

u eat shit

Nah, I'll save it for CurrentlySober, I know he'll appreciate it much better. Thanks though! :)

Now since you mentioning shit already,that remind me i need to visit WC :upsidedow

that might have made sense in 2007 but it is 2012. upgrade you seo game faggot.

you can sink someone site with shit backlinks, happens all the time now.

You could wait and see who takes your spot over the next month or so...give them a link blast, and proceed to report the site. Might be nice for Google when a link spam war breaks out between site owners, further making their search results go down the toilet.

As for me, I'd move on, as there is no way to know which site has wronged you. But I think that's what Google is counting on. There are less ruthless people willing to destroy another person's ranking through such tactics than there are those currently boosting their own sites with artificial link-building methods.

So as TheSquealer accurately stated:

This thread has a significant change in opinion from threads only 2 months back regarding if inbound links do, or do not, harm sites. I remember one thread that I think should just stay buried.

any link building is "artificial" in google eyes.

there are plenty of things you can do to your site to get it penalized or even deindexed. why could you not do that to others? think about it.

What they do is devalue spam links. They are getting better and better at identifying them and devaluing/ignoring them. They can't stop people from link building, from using tools for link building... from using some tools or custom bots to build 1000 tumblr blogs, interlink/like other tumblr blogs and then link them out to your pages. However, they can identify the network and the sudden, inorganic link pattern and ignore their values. When they do that, you will also see the hit for the phrase you were targeting and your page will stop ranking for that phrase for a period of time.

I wish if i could say how you are wrong,but unfortunately you are right.Still their stance how every link building is unnatural is retarded because i would dare to say how 99% of web sites on world have at least one unnatural backlink.After all when you start with building new website you need to put link somewhere byyourself otherwise nobody will ever know for you.

there is a difference between someone placing a link on site to enhance the web experience and link building to manipulate search results.

think about why people that have never heard of seo place links on their site.

I had somebody do this to me and I went from #1 to page nada... After a few days I did a backlink check and found a bunch of shit backlinks that basically made it look like I spammed myself using Xumer or some shit...

Instead of crying I just kept promoting the site using good linking structures and getting people to link to it from social media and what not...

In 2 months it went back to #1 and hasn't moved in a year.

I highly suspect that #2 did it to me since they have none of these shit links, but #3, 4,5,6,7 all do too... While this person spend their budget trying to fuck us all over, I spent mine doing what you are supposed to do... and prevailed...

There are many more cases though where my site never recovered...

I just caught this. I think you are confused maybe. There is a difference between "inbound links" and link spam (i.e. building X number of links per day, when and where possible)

"Inbound links" in terms of people linking to your page have no impact on that page for the phrases it links for when its organic. Others have indicated that relevance matters but it doesn't in terms of penalizing the page. In other words, your page does not get penalized because it happens to go viral and all sorts of people are linking to it from all sorts of pages/topic types.

"inbound links" in terms of using tools to build 10,000 links a day to your page at www.yourdomain.com/mouse-turds.html - which ranks for "mouse turds" using the anchor "mouse turds" as the links anchors will definitely cause that page to drop out of the SERPs for that phrase for a period of time.

It is also true that I can build 10,000 links a day to your page and cause it to drop out of the SERPs. Google has no way of knowing if you are doing the link spam or I am. And no, life's not fair.

So it depends on what one means by "inbound links"