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Being dropped from Google can result in the quick death of a startup company, or lead to the laying off of employees in a well established company.
Take our company for example. We are one of the market leaders in our industry. We have never used SEO or spam techniques, but after 5 years in Google, we were suddenly dropped from the index.
This being dropped from the index, leads to a cascade effect on other search engines, as we were dropped from the Google web hosted results from Yahoo.
The end result, is a 25% drop in traffic despite being well diversified.
For our company, this means I have to layoff 2 people in our order fullfillment department.
Google must address issues, where well established companies, are suddenly dropped from the index for no apparent reason.
I have two employees who are laid off, and I can't tell them when they will be hired back on, as I have no mechanism to contact Google to get the problem fix.
I would gladly pay several hundred dollars to place a google support call, to get the problem fixed.
I pay for support calls to my ISP, the phone company and for payment gateway services.
When they mess up, I can get the problem resolve in a matter of hours or less.
Google must realize that their inaction on technical issues, and the inability to have problems rectified, is having an effect on the economy.
We need to have a pay for support service for Google.
No body should lose their job because Google made a technical mistake.
Yes, you might have pursued other forms of online marketing and advertising, but mostly large brick-and-mortar companies with lots of capital and traditional marketing venues can solely rely on this.
I will proven wrong if someone can come up and say that they started with nothing a couple years ago and built their way to success without ever having been indexed in Google. This is the only person who can truly stand proud and say they didn't put their eggs in one basket. For everyone else, it's just theoretical guesswork as to whether their other "eggs" would have succeeded in a competitive marketplace.
As for the rest of you who never replied to this sub-thread, stay humble and quiet the next time this topic resurfaces.
#2. If we can beat the 'established' sites in the SERPs, we are happy because now we become 'established'. :)
#3. If we are now 'established', there are still people looking forward to beat us out to become 'established'! Just like what we have done in #1.
See the FUN? See the MEANING? ;)
Then one summer someone new starts in the office and they forget to put me in their information - and all the other guides get more business from people who go through the tourist office.
The guy in charge of the tourist office goes away to Nepal for the summer so there's no-one I can talk to anyway.
So what do I do? Feel disgruntled. Sure, but eventually I've got to realise that while it was really nice having those tourist office ads, I was relying on them too much because I had little real control over them.
Get a job as a dishwasher? Nah, not really into that - a plan I'd be happier with would be to contact the travel company reps and see if we can work a deal for doing something with their guests.
And hopefully between this summer and next, I'll have built enough bridges with the tourist office that they'll always check that I'm in the main brochure. Maybe someone new will forget to type my name on the monthly list that goes out to the guests, but these things happen and it's up to me to control my business and deal with stuff like that.
After five years, I would assume a business could be marketing to an established customer base and that would shore them up against any challenge to acquiring new customers.
Two of my clients have faced this challenge when something or other killed their Google traffic for a time (no, I don't do black hat SEO). As noted above, AdWords is a possibility for customer acquisition. And better marketing to your established customers is another revenue booster that does a LOT for the business. Both my clients survived the challenge and both are healthier for what that did to their business model.
Your competitor probably just got a big boost in traffic and is hiring as many employees as you lost ... so there's Google's social responsiblity!
Since you've become dependent on search engine traffic, you just finished SEO 101. Getting the boot is your big promotion. Now you have to learn how to survive while getting the boot, and that's the real world.
Folks that haven't got the boot often have their heads buried in the sand, thinking "Other people get their sites booted, but not me. I'm special." Now you know you're not special after all and it's time to quit whining and get down to work.
Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Ign. Hang around and folks will probably help you learn how to get that traffic back.
I will proven wrong if someone can come up and say that they started with nothing a couple years ago and built their way to success without ever having been indexed in Google.
You are wrong - again, no need to prove it - those being quiet are basking in the warm glow of being superior.
Free listings great! they are a bit like free magazine editorials and only there to please the punters to increase circulation and increase ad sales ITS ABOUT MONEY. If they drop our listings time for a bit of hair and shirt tearing, Then move on and plan a strategy that is our job.
Googles only responsibility is to themselves if Jo Surfer no longer finds what he wants then he will move elsewhere and so will we.
Yes the free serps are in a mess, so what! Time to hit the plastic while the leads still come from Google and if the ROI works great, this is business we are in.
I think leave Google to look after their own kitchen if the results falls below the competition you can guarantee in time we will all be discussing the new traffic provider. Remember Altavista ,and there was a time when my best leads used to come from Excite.
I will proven wrong if someone can come up and say that they started with nothing a couple years ago and built their way to success without ever having been indexed in Google.
I can name you at least 50 highly successful businesses who have never had any worthwhile traffic from Google within five kilometres of where I am sitting (mostly due to incompetent web designers).
But, of course, your point really is:
I will proven wrong if someone can come up and say that they started with nothing a couple years ago and built their way to success by relying on search engines without ever having been indexed in Google.
and that is why so many people are talking about business models.
1. I'd check whether the ISP has been up the entire time.
2. I'd also check using
site:yourdomainname.com -asdfasdf
to see if we actually do have any urls from your site. Our rankings can change, and just because you don't show up for a search doesn't mean that we don't have your pages.
3. Triple-check your robots.txt. If it doesn't exist, I'd make it just to be safe. The very last company that I worked with was worried that they had penalties. Nope, they were running JRun, and JRun was giving a 500 error when spiders tried to fetch robots.txt. We would try several times to re-fetch the robots.txt, always fail with a 500 error, and so we didn't crawl the site to be safe.
4. Communicate with Google. I checked the spam report queue and didn't see any messages with your nickname of "lgn" for example. But the preferred ways to write would be to help@google.com. If you suspect that some staff member did spam on your site, or you get back the email from Google that says we were unable to assign PageRank to your site, then I would play it safe and write to webmaster [at] google.com with the subject line "reinclusion request." Describe your situation (when did this happen? Is your site completely gone or just not ranking how you expect? Did you do anything like hidden text, and what steps have you taken since, etc.).
If you've gone down that checklist already, please let me know. If our process isn't working as it should, then we'll want to see what changes we can make. Without more specifics, I can't debug the situation--you don't list your site in your profile, for example.
[edited by: Umbra at 5:09 pm (utc) on Aug. 19, 2003]
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Regarding MSG #59.
I wasn't replying to your post. I was replying to Umbra. The particular post in question actually addressed Umbra.
Read my post before YOU REPLY.
Nuffsaid.
Mack.
Haven't changed any internal links that create a %09www, unless Google suddenly can't read a relative link like ".../index.html"?
Thank goodness Miscrosoft isn't in Google's dominant position. Urgh... it doesn't bear thinking about!
I say this because maybe you did not get penalize maybe somebody else got better. My competiter lost to information sites including PDF's. His URL is actualy the key phrase. He has always been up there.
thx
I think Google wants to be responsive to problems, they just need an efficient way of doing so.
Say what you will about personal responsibility but there IS a thing called social responsibility. As Google grows to effect the lives of millions of people so grows their responsibility to society.
It's a question of magnitude. The only lasting society is one where citizens and organizations' responsibility is proportionate to their influence on that society. IMHO
Jon
I would gladly pay several hundred dollars to place a google support call, to get the problem fixed.
That's a suggestion to a problem, and one that might make good commercial sense to Google.
To all the rest of you smug <edit> out there, preaching what you do not practice and kicking a forum member while they are down (in particular the forum Administrator), I hope the same happens to you!
Dave
My major point, was that a pay for technical support service is needed so that people that are having true technical problems, can have a quick resolution to these problems. Especially where continuations of these problems can lead to layoff.
I will try to answer some of the questions posted:
1) I do use adwords, and I belive I have adwords fully leverage. I spend about 10,000 a year on adwords, for my niche market. In other words, Im a happy paying customer of Google.
2) I have diversified. I consider a 25% drop for
being thrown out of the only game in town (remember losing google means losing Yahoo)as rather modest. I have done nothing to try to increase my exposure in any search engine, other than providing good content, which leads to many sites that would link to use.
In fact we are in the process of finishing a new warehouse, where we are going to branch into several new unrelated product lines, so the chance of having all of the websites dropped from google at the same time is remote (but I said the same thing about the great blackout of 1965).
3)I have done all of Googleguys sugestions including sending to help@google.com. I will try the webmaster@google.com one this evening. Thank You GoogleGuy.
4) I will forgive everybody who flame me (including Brett). I will put it down to little sleep or to many beers :)
5) This has been a learning experience. I have noticed that you get better CTR on free listings than you do on Adwords Ads for example.
6) I never suggested that Google should be regulated by Government. That would kill it.
I believe my problems are due to 301 redirects (and they are 301's and not 302's).
Despite people telling me that using 301's to point to a new domain is seamless, I am afraid that it didn't work for me.
Next time I will bug Yahoo, DMOZ and all the other High PR sites that are linking to us, to use the new domain name, endlessly until they comply. Then Google will pick up the new domain
as the higher PR domain automatically.
It happened to my stuff all of the time for the more competitive keywords this summer. I've had pages disappear from the #1 position, when they had been in the top 5 search returns for several years, to somewhere past position hundred (I stopped bothering to look where they were after position 100), only to appear back again the next week at #1, then disappear, then come back to #1, and so on, all without me making a single change to the HTML.
They are all back now to where they belong :-) and getting some nice traffic, but it was a bit depressing having so many pages tank for awhile.
jojojo, I'd also do a spam report--easier for me to check that queue than hunt down the right person in user support to ask. Umbra, it could also have been an outside link to your site with %09 in it, if that's happened recently.
