Recently Google banned MasterNewMedia a PR7 blog from its search engine results. The author is still not clear about the reason for this worst nightmare.
Robin says that around 16,000 master new media blog posts have been penalized and removed from Google search result pages. Till last week the blog was at number one position in Google search results for the terms like “Independent publishers” now rank 504 in search results.
Author previously said that the reason for this penalty was Text Link Ads and some hidden text on blog, but in his latest post he says that there may be some other reasons like “Spam comments left on articles for long time or multiple domains pointing to same IP creating duplicate content”.
Author Robin is suffering many losses at the same time like, loss of $4000 of Adsense revenue, $3000 of Text link add revenue and mainly traffic loss of around 1/4 from 16,000 per day to merely 3000 a day. He can’t even pay the office and staff bills dues due to this disaster.
As I said this could be the worst nightmare for any independent publisher. If you don’t want to get penalized by Google take some lessons from Robins mistakes (May be some mistakes) . Follow strictly the Webmaster quality guidelines given by search engines like Google. After all Google is our bread and butter.
If you don’t have time to read all the Webmaster Quality guidelines I have summarized those for you here.
- Avoid “Cloaking”, means don’t show different pages to search engines and different to your readers. Always build the pages for users and not for the search engines. Don’t use page redirects and don’t create Doorway pages as well.
- Don’t participate in link exchange schemes running to increase the page rank. Stay away from web spammers or bad neighbors, as this may affect your ranking. In short don’t participate in any scheme that will try to artificially boost your ranking.
- Don’t send automatic or programmatic request to submit your pages, to check page rank etc. As these queries unnecessarily increase the server loads.
- Avoid hidden text and hidden links anywhere on your pages.
- Don’t use irrelevant keywords just to boost your ranking. Avoid domains creating multiple same pages or duplicate contents.
- For sites participating in affiliate programs make sure you have sufficient, logical unique and relevant content build for users only.
There are some more deceptive techniques in which you should not participate but violating the above listed guidelines may cause permanent removal of all your pages from Google index.
Last important guideline for Adsense publishers, Do not generate artificial add or page impressions and do not generate invalid add clicks.
Following these simple guidelines will benefit you as well as your readers. Be a proud publisher!
I can’t believe they did that to Robin Good. Didn’t know he made that kind of green! Thanks for the tips.
I wonder how long it will be before someone sues Google for loss of revenue? Some of these bannings seem ridiculously random, and their refusal to tell people where they went wrong doesn’t help.
I know Google will say that other search engines are available, but TBH they’re close to a monopoly position.
Hi Vijay,
Thanks for this article. It is shocking to lose so many free traffic. Google was against hidden texts from the first day it started working. I don’t know why such a professional blogger like Robin had not noticed it.
However, if he fixes the problems and then requests for re-inclusion, they will do it but he should not expect to have the same ranking as he was used to have.
I have had my site banned from google before. It is just a blogspot.com blog, so I really had no clue why it happened.
Obviously, for me the stakes were much lower, but it is an interesting experience to say the least. I really wish that the information and appeals process were a bit more clear in cases such as this.
@Vahid Don’t know who is wrong now. But there must be some mistake from Robin. And also there will be debate on should Google give one chance to publishers to correct their mistakes?
@Jess I think Google banned some blogspot blogs before this also. The main reason I found in many cases is objectional content. Like recently Google banned a blog having posted Facebook leaked code.
I agree with you about the problems any publisher will face on getting his business ban and specially if you are totally dependent on that business..
@Vijay – Yeah, my aviation videos from youtube, and comments about flying must have been really objectionable. :-)
I do think you are correct, though, that they have been fairly heavy-handed with blogger users lately. It seems like getting any pagerank (not a good one, just any pr at all) is harder than ever.
I suspect time will heal the problems, though.
Google is struggling to provide good search results as so many people are trying to buck the system. Moral off the story? Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Thank you for the advice, it can be very frustrating trying to keep up with all the google changes. Should you get rid of all your link exchanges or just stop doing them.