I got lost

I had no idea a week had passed since my last post, but you can blame “the search engine that shall not be named”, otherwise known as “G**gle”, for keeping me away and obsessing about other work.  You see, TSETSNBN decided about three weeks ago to completely ban 6 of our major domains from their index.  They didn’t just lower our rankings or make us harder to find in the results, they completely removed us, as if we don’t exist.  What crime did we commit?  Did we spam?  Did we cloak?  Did we redirect?  Did we steal content?  Did we have hidden text or links?  No, we didn’t do any of those things.  What we did was to put links to about 8 other “unrelated” sites on our webpage, and thus we were banished.  I know for a fact this is true, “straight from the horse’s mouth”, so to speak, so I’m not exaggerating what happened to us.  If you do any search engine optimization work you’ll know what I mean when I say there was absolutely no “blackhat” stuff going on.  The sites that were banned were sites which offered various free webmaster services, and which we’ve spent literally thousands of dollars on over the past 3 years as we hired programmers and leased dedicated servers.  People love our product, we’ve got great in-bound links, and our content is completely original.  At least one of the banned sites is #1 in MSN for its main search term.  Still, we got banned from TSETSNBN.  And I’m told the only way we’ll get back in is to remove the “offending” links, and then to write to G**gle to beg forgiveness.  Please note that when other big budget sites, like the UC Berkeley student newspaper, put text links on their index page (scroll down to the bottom left of the page), they aren’t punished at all.  G**gle freely admits they will “undervalue” the out-going links, but they don’t ban the source of the links.  They just ban us, the little guy.  Now our traffic is in the tank, and I’m forced to decide between trying to get people to visit our “income-generating” sites via text links, or being ranked in G**gle.  Personally, I think that if your search engine algorithm is so lousy that it forces you to ban websites with good content because a few text links might throw off your results, well, I think you need a new algorithm.  But what do I know—I’m not the one worth billions of dollars.

And yes, after seeing years of work go down the toilet, I’m a little annoyed.  We’re lucky because we make a good living from site listings in MSN and Yahoo, but it’s going to be tough for me to change my attitude and to really feel that MSN and Yahoo are “enough”.  Really, they are, but working on the Internet for a living is being constantly brainwashed that you absolutely MUST place well in G**gle or you’d might as well throw in the towel.  I won’t throw in the towel—we’ve got a mortgage, a car payment, and innumerable furry “children” to care for, but I think I’m going to try to stress a bit less.  And if you use G**gle as your primary search engine, keep in mind that they do hand-editing of results that can make perfectly valid and informative sites not available to you, as per their personal agenda.

On a more pleasant note, we spent the day at the SuperZoo pet trade show, where we met lots of really nice people, saw some fabulous products, and came home loaded down with freebies.  We might not need to buy dog snacks for the next year.  We took some photos, too, and over the next few days either Flippy or I will write about our favourite products and upload some pictures.  The show is still on tomorrow, and many vendors promised to give us samples of large pet toys, fresh catnip, cat grass, etc. that they don’t want to have to ship back to their company, but I think we’re just too tired to tackle the show again.  It took us over four hours to just do a browsing of all the pet product booths, and we didn’t even manage to start to visit the adjacent garden show.  Apparently the garden show gives away all kinds of plants and flowers on their last day, but really, I don’t think my feet would ever forgive me.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 09/21 at 08:25 PM

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  1. Sorry about your trouble with Google.  I am not sure how it all works, but that seriously sucks.

    I tend to stick with Yahoo as my search engine.  I have noticed that Google does not have nearly the same quality of results.

    I hope that things get sorted out.  It sucks to have someone else’s mistake hit you in the pocket book.

    PS.  I hate Google for hotlinking with its image search.

    Posted by Expat  on  09/22  at  07:15 AM

  2. You go, girl wink

    Posted by Leigh-Ann (aka Mudpuppy)  on  09/22  at  09:15 PM
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