Thread: Google Warning - crackdown on SEO in three 3 weeks

Just checked!
Yep, one of my amazon blogs are gone from google.
Searching for it does not bring it up!
So, if you have blogs using WProbot?
Find something else.

No some other amazon sites are okay, so far.

Wonder if google messes with so many amazon sites, if amazon will throw a fit?
Or come up with something else for their affiliates?

Amazon has also done their share of damage to their affiliates over the past two years. I don't think Amazon is very serious about their affiliate program any longer. Between the loss of the user reviews from the feed, to the rationing of queries, they have made it difficult to be an affiliate who operates multiple XML feed sites. When they first started rationing queries, my sites wouldn't stay up for more than 20 minutes because I had tons of traffic and spider activity. I had to severely curtail the spider activity in order to keep the sites up.

Do a site query command to see if your Amazon site has been de-indexed. When it is completely de-indexed the PR also drops to n/a.

I checked a friend's Amazon sites a few hours ago and almost half of his sites are gone from Google's index. Only two of my sites were de-indexed, but the rest were losing pages rapidly, so I shut them all down. After the domains cool off for a few months I will use them for something else.

My big question is, "Will Google butcher data feeds sites from their Google Affiliate Network?" Those sites have the same duplicate content issues that the Amazon data feed sites have. I have several sites running their data feeds and will be watching them. If they do not penalize their own affiliates, Amazon could have a good legal case against Google.

That's how I found out it was de-indexed by doing a page rank check.
PR 2 to PR NA!
So ran it through google and nothing for that site comes up.
Just references to it from other sites.

Why I am seriously looking at shutting down everything.
Just close down all my sites and blogs, except for my 2 big blogs.
All the rest, sell off, or like I say, just let them die.
Which they would if and when I cut off the hosting.

Hey, it just hit me....
The blog feed here is no more?
No one is showing their recent blog post!

I am not planning to drop my de-indexed domains at this point. When I take a site down I put up a placeholder page with unique content just to keep the domain alive. I just don't know how difficult it will be to revive the domain when I come up with another use for it.

Originally Posted by iowadawg

Hey, it just hit me....
The blog feed here is no more?
No one is showing their recent blog post!

NB is still using the temporary theme due to the upgrade problems with vBulletin.

I ran across a good article today Is Google’s “Over Optimization Penalty” Its “Jump The Shark” Moment In Web Search?

Danny Sullivan points out that "in 1999, Sergey Brin declared that there was no search engine spam" amd he goes on to say:

My fear is that talking about “over optimization” is Google trying to cater to the anti-SEO crowd, which blames any bad results on SEO, rather than Google itself not keeping up with the challenges of ranking.

Read more: http://marketingland.com/is-googles-...eb-search-8633

Matt Cutts Jumps the Shark?

For search, I don't think google or any other company could ever come up with an algorithm that truly works.

Seems like, google would have to hire a few million people just to check each site and assign it to some keyword or phrase that fits the site.

Then of course, people would cry about favoritism!

But reading carefully what google says, and does not say, I believe that google is trying to go back to the days before seo and page rank.
Telling people in so many couched words and terms that: hey, quit relying on search traffic!

EDIT:
My amazon blog that got de-indexed by google?
Traffic has not decreased nor increased!
Still steady day to day to day.

But did change it using another script to a new amazon store that does not pull in via xml feed.
Now to see how long to get it back in the google serp's.

And get back the page rank it had!

Every time Google gets on a vendetta about spam a lot of innocent sites suffer collateral damage. The worst damage is usually done to e-commerce sites. The results from Google's periodic vendettas is that they have systematically destroyed billions of dollars worth of value on the web.

IMHO, over the past few years Google has created search results that look like garbage, especially when you are dealing with local search results. They are so cluttered up with Places accounts, Google Maps, and AdWords ads that they are altering to make them look like organic results without the advertisers knowledge or permission. It is getting very hard to find the organic results in many situations, which makes the results pages almost completely artificially manipulated by Google. Google is therefore spamming their own search results.

People will always do what the Google's algorithms encourage them to do in order to win the top ranking spots. I for one do not believe that there is a way to tell algorithmically which pages actually have the best content. "Quality" is something that way too subjective for an algorithm to deal with. Unless you are going to go to the level of true artificial intelligence, computer algorithms are objective in nature. They can only do what a programmer tells them to do.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

Every time Google gets on a vendetta about spam a lot of innocent sites suffer collateral damage. The worst damage is usually done to e-commerce sites. The results from Google's periodic vendettas is that they have systematically destroyed billions of dollars worth of value on the web.

I wonder how you will get an over-optimization removed? I read somewhere that only 14% of websites hit by Panda are fully recovered.

Originally Posted by bogart

I wonder how you will get an over-optimization removed? I read somewhere that only 14% of websites hit by Panda are fully recovered.

Getting an over-optimization penalty removed would depend upon which signals they use to detect over-optimization. Most problems are fixable if you can identify the problem. Given Google's history, the cause for some penalties will be completely obvious and others will be obscure.

The 14% makes some sense to me. There were a ton of autoblogs, sites using syndicated content and ezinearticles content that were removed. A lot of people who used this type of content successfully would not consider removing the duplicate content and re-writing all of it. There are also probably a lot of site owners who have no clue as to what hit their sites.

I'm in the same situation with my Amazon sites that were using Amazon's XML feed. Rewriting the content for 20 million products is not a consideration.

Google may post notices in Webmaster Tools accounts. They have been doing that when lots of poor quality links are an issue. They could start to post notices for content issues, as well. This is pure speculation and wishful thinking. I actually think Google will slap sites without any warning.

Originally Posted by bogart

Matt Cutt says the new update will "level the playing field".

Yeah, "level" it even more away from small players and even more towards brands with large advertising budgets.