I am upset with Google. AS we've all seen, a certain person at Google makes these little SEO advice videos and tells people to 'write compelling content'.
Well folks, I've done exactly that, and I ended up with a hard penalty.
So here's the situation: I have a web site in which I write interesting health articles. A certain person at Google has always said that if you write compelling content, that people will naturally link to you and boost your rankings.
Well, I've written some pretty good content, good enough that people have linked to me and actually praised my site as being one of their favorite health blogs.
When I first started, I traded about 10 reciprocal links over the course of a year, with some QUALITY, RELEVANT link partners. These are webmasters of fitness blogs that I actually read, so I could vouch for them. They were not spam sites.
I had some forums, but I recently removed them since they got attacked by spammers and it was unmanageable.
Anyway, on November 19th 2010, Google decides to penalize my site with this ridiculous "minus 50 penalty". The -50 penalty is basically a filter so that nobody could find your site within the first few pages of Google. In a nutshell, it kills your traffic.
Now, if you look at my site, you'll see that I'm NOT a spammer. In fact, the real spam sites are now ranking for my trademark name! Meanwhile, I'm stuck on page 6 of Google for my own web site name. So Google would rather put spam sites in front of my site? How could this make any sense?
I look at these Google Webmaster advice videos about how to make a good site and realize that it's all failed me. I'm now very discouraged to say the least.
Can anyone tell me what is going on here? My site is fixed, I've removed the reciprocal links to my fellow fitness sites. They weren't excessive in the first place. I've made a great site, cleaned up the few reciprocal links that I had, and now am I gonna be stuck here forever?
Why is this happening? And why aren't my reconsideration requests working? It's been over 4 months now and I am very upset. I have taken a couple years of my spare time to create a high quality web site, busting my butt to write all these good articles, only to have Google come and unfairly throw my site into the gutter without any rhyme or reason.
I feel like I just got the death penalty without even having a trial. Google being considered a monopoly is one thing, but having them unfairly penalize you is another.
My web site is very friendly and is fully compliant with Google Guidelines! Why, oh why, am I penalized?
-Frustrated Webmaster
[edited by: tedster at 9:29 am (utc) on Mar 23, 2011]
[edit reason] member requested [/edit]
