I’m Stuck In Google Hell
Nov 14th, 2007 by Brent Wilson
My Ford Mustang website, Mustang Evolution, has been around since May of 2003. The site has had 4 name changes since it was started with the fourth being Mustangevolution. The site has consisted of a Wordpress blog for over a year now and a vBulletin forum since January of 2004 (Originally started with phpBB). The blog has over 100 entries of high quality content directly related to Ford Mustangs. It has a section for Ford Mustang history with a page for every year Mustang from 1991-2008 and more are being added every week and will eventually cover 1964-2008. The forum is large, 5,000+ members, 27,000 threads and 414,000 posts. It’s highly optimized for both users and search engines. Appropriate h1 tags, rewritten urls to reduce duplicate urls and a very detailed robots.txt to remove duplicate content. The site does not use any spammy techniques at all and has no reason to be penalized.
Which leads me to the whole point of this post.
This is a screen shot of my Google referrals for yesterday:
13 Google referrals for the ENTIRE day yesterday. I get more Google referrals in a day on my Music Forum which has less than 3,000 total posts. I rank 5th in Google for Music Forums for a site just over a year old. That tells me right there that my techniques are not the cause.
That’s not even the most absurd part. This is from my Google Webmaster Tools:
First screen shot shows that Google is visiting the site and indexing the pages. Second screen shot shows why I’m going to lose my hair before I hit 30.
I rank 315th for Mustang, and 94th for Mustang Forums. I don’t even show up in the list for Ford Mustang or any of the other thousands of queries that one would think I would rank atleast in the TOP 50 for being a Mustang site and all.
The thing that is the most frustrating is I can’t do anything to improve it. I’ve had articles get to the front page of Digg, Netscape (now Propeller), I have been linked to from Autoblog more times than I can count. Google links says I have 50,000+ links to my homepage alone and some of my articles have more than 200+ links pointing to them. I’ve sat at the computer all night building links and writing good quality content and my Google rankings don’t even flinch. I’m losing thousands of people a day to my site because of Google’s flawed algorithm. I’ve filed more than one reinclusion request over the last two years. The kicker is how do you file a request for reinclusion when you have no idea what you did wrong?
I’m not the only one with large sites that are having issues either. Kathy of Hystersisters.com has an Open Letter To Google posted on her blog.
I’m running out of patience and options. My site is suffering due to the lack of Google rankings. Yahoo sent me 48,000 uniques in one day and I can’t even get 20 from Google. How the hell does that work? If you type Mustang Forums in google and browse through the first 5 pages and you can see that my site clearly fits in among those. Some of the listings I clearly should rank above.
I’m open to any suggestions. I’ve made attempts at contacting Matt Cutts via his blog but my comments are removed because I reference my site, I suppose he figured it was spam. The problem is I don’t know how else to explain my problem effectively without spelling it out just like I have here.
Hi Brent, from a quick look, it appears that there was some pretty aggressive link activities in the last year? Looks like you were in digital co-op network or another similar link exchange? In addition, at the beginning of 2007 it looks like mustangevolution was selling links, e.g. “Static Link Package:Run of Content Site, Non-Exclusive, Does not appear on forum, 5 total links]
* Flat Rate 6 Month contract: $100.00 Per Link
* Flat Rate 12 Month contract: $175.00 Per Link
”
That sort of link selling or excessive link exchanging can affect a site’s reputation, according to
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736
If you are no longer participating in the link exchanges, and you’re not selling links that pass PageRank, then I’d submit a reconsideration request: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35843
Hope that helps,
Matt Cutts
First I want to thank you for personally responding to my post here. It’s something I was never expecting and it is much appreciated.
“Looks like you were in digital co-op network or another similar link exchange?”
I’ve used Co-Op before experimenting with it but it’s been over a year since I actively ran it on my site. If it was flagged manually for it that’s pretty lame in my opinion considering the amount of links that my competitors sell on their sites and seem to have no problem getting ranked within Google. If it wasn’t flagged manually and is part of your algorithm then it should have become known sometime ago that they had been removed and not be an issue right now.
“In addition, at the beginning of 2007 it looks like mustangevolution was selling links, e.g. “Static Link Package:Run of Content Site, Non-Exclusive, Does not appear on forum, 5 total links]”
Yes I am selling links. So are my competitors. I’ll be glad to give you all their urls so that you can properly ban them completely from Google’s search index. Not trying to be rude but it’s really frustrating to see my competitors getting away with selling links.
http://www.mustangforums.com sells links above the fold with no nofollow tag. Blatantly disregarding Google’s guidelines on selling links. However when you type in Mustang Forums in google guess which site is the first to appear with Site Links?
It’s double standards like these that lead people like Aaron Wall to write the things that he does about Google. It’s frustrating from a webmasters standpoint the double standards involved. Google looks blindly at some sites while punishing others. Most of the time the ones that get punished are the small sites and the ones that escape are the larger ones that make Google good money.
When MustangForums (and the rest of my competitors who sell links for PR) are penalized for selling links and/or I am removed from this black hole I am in within Google I’ll have more faith in what Google hopes to accomplish as a search engine, which is quality search results.
I will take your advice however and submit the reinclusion request since I no longer use Digital Co-op or sell links for Pagerank. All I ask is that you look at what you are telling me and ask yourself why my competitors are allowed to get away with selling links, on a much more massive scale, and are not being punished within Google’s SERPs.
I just want to follow up that my Google rankings have drastically improved today. Thank you Matt Cutts for responding and helping me with this.