ncwonline - 6:56 pm on Aug 31, 2005 (gmt 0)

Seo1

The big difference here is people are not sure what the heck happened with google and how exactly to go about fixing it.

A lot of people are confused by it all so they complain. I myself used to have a lot of G traffic and 90% of it went away. I have done a lot of digging and I think I have figured out what happened. I finally got busted for doing lots of spammy things that at the time I just thought where smart because it helped my other sites. Now I am cleaning up my main site and I will see if it all helps. But I am still confused because no one is there to tell me exactly what I did both on-site and 0ff-site that has offended the big G.

Google and the other engines don't like black hat stuff but what should we call what they do to us? I know lots of site rankings where lowered for no apparent reason.

I have a feeling it may have to do with algo changes because of adsense scraper sites etc but I also suspect G is going to be rolling things around on a more regular basis in order to drive people to use adwords.

I know I am certainly going to look into it as it seams just as easy to play that game as to pay an SEO outfit big bucks to get back in the listings. I just don't have the bucks to play the paid SEO thing. Nothing against you SEO guys but lots of us small fish are in that boat.

At least with a hurricane if the thing blows away your house or business you know exactly what needs to be done to fix things. Sure it is not easy but it is right there in front of you and you know or can figure out what has to be done. With G people are many times just at a loss as to what the heck happened.

I really wish G would be more up front about that kind of thing. I mean if they had some kind of service that could rank your site for say 1 to 10 for a bunch of things but still not guarantee any SE ranking placement I would gladly pay to have them tell me exactly what was good or bad about my site from the google point of view.

They could have some kind of site evaluation spider system. You could sign up, pay your money and they would turn the thing loose on your site. A short time later depending on site size etc you could log in and read what the big G thought about all relevant points for your site design including such things as duplicate content penalties etc. You could then work on any offending sections make changes etc and have the site re-spidered to check it. In the end you could have a clean G bill of health so you would at least know where you stood and could be sure you where not being penalized for things you where doing both on-site and off-site that you just did not realize was bad for your site.

All this would have nothing to do with key words or ranking for certain terms etc just site design and how it looked to google. This way if you where going to be hit for something you would know and you could set about fixing the known problem not floundering about in the dark wondering where the light switch was.

I am not some evil scraper site builder but I do have about 10 sites that I have adsense on. I also have about 100 or so domains and 1 huge site 16 k pages that if I link my other sites from it they get spidered right then and found in the SE's in a few weeks (except google). If doing this kind of stuff has google seeing me as some kind of evil webmaster I would certainly like to know that. I am just trying to do what I can to get by but it would be nice not to be doing stuff that in some unwritten rule book somewhere in the googleplex was considered bad.

You guys think what you will about this. I know a lot of you are way passed the point of knowing what is what for site design etc for google and the other engines but lots of us have been skating along getting by just fine with our half way decent sites and BAM we are toast in the search results where we used to be doing fine.

Thing thing is we just don't know for sure if it was something we had control over and could/should fix or not.

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