Damn Google to Hell

Gary Lee 8.08 am on 15.11.2007 Reply

Since bringing this blog back to life, I’ve been renewed with new ideas on how to build new traffic for this site, along with looking at my current sources of traffic to see what can be improved upon. Last night, I was looking at my Analytic stats and less than 5% of my traffic comes from Google.com search results. My first reaction is of extreme annoyance as I can’t even rank for “Best Booth at Blog World Expo” which is such a distinct title that I thought I would for sure rank on the first page of google. After a few days of waiting and a new ping list from Darin Carter, I got nothing. I literally went 10 pages deep into the search and got nothing. I was THIS close from shutting the whole blog down and exporting everything to Creative Traffic Builders, which is another blog I’m slowly starting (volunteer writers anyone?).

I have to admit that I probably have been dinged by google. Launching the Name in My Domain Link Train and the Technorati Faves Link Train, then doing my whole iPhone Giveaway contest, I can see why they would ding me. But still . . . they weren’t that bad, were they? muhahhaa

Just to let you know, I have done everything possible to make myself google friendly:

Created my Sitemap.xml files
Submitted my sitemap.xml files to Google Webmasters
Made sure my robots.txt files were correct
Made sure I had no 301 redirects that were penalizing my site
Used “site:http://www.mrgarylee.com” to see that 239 pages of this blog are indexed
Used “link:http://www.mrgarylee.com” to see that 301 sites are linked to this blog

Before I destroyed this site, I went to go ask some friends online to see what their opinions were – Nate Whitehill, Ms. Danielle, John Chow and Greg Morgan.

Nate Whitehill says “Screw Google . . . . . their traffic is garbage for a personal blog. The bounce rate is high and the page views per user are low”

John Chow says “Join the Club”

Ms. Danielle says “Oh man . . . . . you’ve been cursed since forever”

Greg Morgan says “It’s all about digg and stumble . . . . don’t worry about it man!”

So like Greg said, I’m not gonna worry about it and just worry about pumping out content and using the social network/bookmarking tools out there to try and increase my feed subscriptions.

BenSpark 8.56 am on 15.11.2007 Permalink

Hi Mr. Gary Lee. I have been a reader of your blog for a while. I even entered one of your contests. I regret not introducing myself to you at Blog World Expo. So much to do. Anyway Google got me as well on many of my blogs. And it happened multiple times this past well. It prompted me to buy the domain name for a rally cry against Google’s tyranny and arbitrary smacking. I calle it GoogleisnotGod.com. Maybe it born out of was frustration but I think many people are suffering from the same frustrations with Google as well. And I am ironically parking it on Google’s Blogger platform as well as using Google Analytics to check the traffic.
ms danielle 10.10 am on 15.11.2007 Permalink

yea your site is definitely on google’s crap list. sorry dude. i think if you hit up the social networks and keep writing your great content, people will find you for sure from the buzz. look at JC…
Gary Lee 10.41 am on 15.11.2007 Permalink

hi ben . . sorry we couldn’t meet at Blog World Expo . . . i definitely had some free time while i was goofing around at the booths . . i totally agree with you about the love/hate relationship with Google . . . the only thing I think we can all do is help other competitors such as yahoo and msn figure a way out to gain more market share back . . . once the playing field is evened out is when google will get off their high horse . . . anyways, thanks for reading my blog and i hope to meet you at the other conventions!
Gary Lee 10.42 am on 15.11.2007 Permalink

haha . . maybe you should be a lil careful too . . . i don’t think you’re that far behind me in the scheming
David Ledoux 2.12 pm on 15.11.2007 Permalink

In six months you’ll look back on this post and laugh…ok, maybe not laugh but you’ll smirk with a raised eyebrow. Go to Elance and have a writer compile the best 50 posts on your site into an ebook…load it with quality back links and affiliate links and release it into the wild. Use scribd.com and bundle it with all the PLR guys, you’ll have tens of thousands of copies out there within a year.
Gyutae Park 7.59 pm on 15.11.2007 Permalink

Those contests should not have affected your Google ranking. Google did a Page Rank penalty for sites selling links a couple weeks ago but this did not change actual rankings.

Looking at your blog’s source code, I can already see huge opportunities to increase your rankings in Google. For example, every one of your pages uses a universal h1 and h2 tag. Essentially you are telling Google that all of your pages are have the same heading. A big mistake that will prevent your pages even being indexed in the search engines. Ideally, your posts should have unique header tags that correspond to the post’s title.

I’m actually doing a contest for a free blog audit, so if you’re interested in that, make sure you enter for a full analysis. http://www.winningtheweb.com/blog-audit-contest.php
Gyutae Park 8.08 pm on 15.11.2007 Permalink

Also, for further proof, you can tell that you are not penalized in Google because you are the number 1 search result for your name in Google, “mr gary lee”. Google gives a huge advantage to sites with an exact domain name match with the search keyword.

If you were really penalized, you probably would not even show up for your name. This is the case with John Chow being on the 5th page of search results pages for his own name.

As for linking contests, they could potentially get you penalized, but usually for sites with higher exposure. These penalties are hand edits given by real humans to send a signal, so they usually won’t bother with smaller sites.
Matt 8.43 pm on 15.11.2007 Permalink

Uhh… Google doesn’t penalize sites for 301 redirects. In fact, Google probably likes them, since it lets them know where the page is now located at, so they can update their index and send users to the correct page.
Gary Lee 9.34 pm on 15.11.2007 Permalink

wow . . i was just thinking about the same thing today . . . the problem is finding out what my 50 best posts are . . .
Gary Lee 9.40 pm on 15.11.2007 Permalink

i checked my universal h1 and h2 tags and i’m using an All in One SEO tool plugin that Ms Danielle is using as well . . . I don’t know if this is the problem, but i’ll test it to make sure . . . your contest looks very interesting . . i’m gonna come over and check it out
Gary Lee 9.48 pm on 15.11.2007 Permalink

it helps with the indexing, but if you have too many 301 redirects, google might think that something shady is going on . . .
Gyutae Park 10.23 pm on 15.11.2007 Permalink

Naw, I use this plugin as well and it’s not the problem. What you probably need to do is edit your WordPress theme to include the post’s heading between h1 tags in individual post pages and remove the h1 from your site’s main title.
Gary Lee 10.43 pm on 15.11.2007 Permalink

hmm . . . maybe i’ll just change this theme then . . . give me a few days to get one up
Rodelio Lagahit 11.58 pm on 15.11.2007 Permalink

drop this blog ..im willing to accept this one for FREE! ..
Ed Lau 2.11 am on 18.11.2007 Permalink

I think I’ve been rather lucky, flying under Google’s radar and maintaining my PR4 despite the TLAs and such. And I still get a lot of Google search traffic…especially for movie reviews.
BobBuskirk.com » Blog Archive » Google Keeps on Screwing Us! 5.11 am on 21.11.2007 Permalink

[...] people who have done link trains and contests on their blogs are being hit, even de-index by Google! So [...]
Jez 2.26 pm on 21.11.2007 Permalink

Thought U had come unstuck when I saw you lost SERP on your golf site… wouldn’t worry about it, like you say, you have another blog you can use if you want….