RSS Feeds: A Matter of Perception
I'm irritable and I have a good reason for being irritable. Around the beginning of the month, this blog was penalized by Google in the search engine rankings and I'm clueless. I'm guessing it's probably something as simple as a matter of perception.
Blog Reviews
I don't do blog or website reviews anymore. There are several reasons and I'll point out just three:
- I don't monetize them.
- I no longer have the time luxury I once had.
- They've been perceived as paid reviews.
This comment from 2007 on Matt Cutts' blog about blog reviews sums it up. Doing things just for the sake of helping people out doesn't seem to factor in the perception of some people.
Sponsored or Paid Links
I've been approached, by email, on numerous occasions about getting paid to put sitewide links in the sidebar, like the ones that are already there. The perception, apparently, is that I'm being paid to have those links there. The truth is that, other than the linkshowoff.com JavaScript widget, there are ZERO paid links on my sidebar.
I get contacted about link exchanges and "in-text" paid links all the time and I don't even bother to reply to most. I give out tons of one-way links because they're the best kind to give. I also delete pingbacks from well-wishers to prevent them from being reciprocal links. I don't do that all the time, but I do it a lot. Of course, 90 percent are from spam blogs so I really don't feel too bad about it.
SEO De-Optimization
Since I strongly suspect that something I had or have on my blog triggered a filter of some kind, I went through the process of "de-optimizing" it. I "nofollowed" the link back to my home page in the footer. I changed my comment author name to make it just my name (throughout the database). I removed anything and everything from sidebar and footer areas that would send too many links to internal pages.
I deleted more than 50 posts — most had no traffic going to them anyway and some of them were blog reviews to blogs that don't even exist anymore. I went through hundreds of posts to remove anything that might look like link spam to the human eye. I think I actually only edited seven or eight posts, which is nothing when you have nearly 1,300 posts.
Reconsideration Request
Although I can't figure out if did anything wrong, I still submitted a reconsideration request via Google's Webmaster Tools (a couple of days ago). Who knows? Perhaps there's something that sets off a red flag that I don't even know about. It wouldn't be the first time I was hacked (although I seriously doubt this is the case this time).
As far as I know, I have no hidden links and I'm not keyword stuffing (unless you call Yahoo suggested tags being used as keyword stuffing). I really am clueless as to what happened and why.
Perhaps someone on the Google spam team saw something they didn't like or someone reported something as link spam. After all, spam is in the eye of beholder, literally. It's all a matter of perception.
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I know i had trouble with these updates. My websites ranking kept going up and down but they stabilized. But stuff like this happens from time to time.
My latest blog post: Backlinks
google can be a real pain in the ass.
I admire a lot of their commitment to making the internet more about the user experience but i detest them trying to shape the internet as they see fit.
Some of my Google traffic has returned, but not all of it. I seriously doubt the traffic drop had anything to do with what I've done.
I'm more inclined to believe that a lot of the links pointing to my pages haven't been re-indexed properly, downgraded or de-indexed altogether. Nothing else would explain why I still have some page 1 terms against competitive sites.
So if anyone's worried, don't be. For other reasons, having nothing to do with this, I've made the blog "nofollow" again. Perhaps things will change by the end of the month.
Hi RT,
Sorry for your troubles, it sucks, and so frustrating, is it just the home page that lost SERP rank or do you believe many internal pages lost rank and therefore the mass loss of traffic? As you said it all sounds quite nefarious and strange, I blogged about CC and have not seen a blast of any kind.
My latest blog post: Freelance Work From Home – 16 Freelance Sites
I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with CC. Many of my top ranked pages took a dive in the SERPS. Some of them actually went up in the SERPS and this is why I think something else is going on. I checked my sitemap on Google and like 300 pages aren't indexed at all (no links going to them I'm sure), but the rest are there.
I also blogged CC avidly and my PR has increased.
For anyone still interested, my Google traffic has returned. I can't tell you why it left so I can't tell you why it returned.
Sounds like an unwarranted penalization. Your rankings were penalized, but not your page level.
I'm closing the comments on this post. I found the problem and I wrote about it here: http://www.untwistedvortex.com/2009/04/19/kill-google-search-traffic-quickly-exitjunctioncom/