Life After Google

[affiliation]

I thought I would share this with everyone to show Google may be King but Bing is most definately the Queen. It would be interesting to hear of similiar stories.

It can seem like the end of the world getting a G penality. I have had my share of them, the most recent at the start of the year a -50. The site was a high earning site and I was ready to hang the boots up and move on.

After the initial shock and numb feeling that lasted around three days, I decided that it was time to look at what to do and where to go. Looking at my stats traffic was down from a high of 18,000 to numbers that I had seen years ago, 800+. Not a single Google referal a few Yahoo and the rest of them Bing.

I thought perhaps it is worse than I thought. At the time I employed 5 people, all working on the site. Unfortunately one of them had to go immediately, a hard decission. I spent a few weeks pondering what was wrong with the site, reluctant to change it as it ranked at the top of it's field for years, and Google had to know about it as it was in a fiercly competitive bunch of results, and I had seen manual checks over the years.

I decided not to change anything in general, I ran a copyscape search for duplicate content, and although I found some people had copied a few pages of my content it was not bad. I found a few people had added sitewide links to me, although in my opinion if someone thinks your site is so good that they want to add a sitewide link to your site and if Google does not like it, then penalise them. When I was satisfied that nothing had changed, I submitted a reinclusion request saying exactly what I had done, as described above. After some time I got the standard reply, "if your site meets webmaster guidelines .. BLAH... BLAH".

I noticed I was still getting sales, so I began to investigate this. Sales were converting well with Bing, at less than 10% of the traffic that I had I was still making 25% of my usual sales. Obviously this is not enough to operate at the level and expense I was, so over the next few months I paid off another 3 staff, leaving myself and one employee.

I have had to accept now in the short term that there is no Google for me. Bing has convrted exceptional and now they are displayed in Yahoo results the future looks fair. I have now began to make my site SEO with not Google in mind but Bing. Sales have grown and I must thank Bing for not abandoning me. In my opinion Google is not only punishing me but they are also punishing their users by not displaying a product their users want at the position it should be.

As I bagan, Google is great and can make people a good living. My personal thought on Google penalities is, In any law abiding country you are innocent until proven guilty. Google justice seems you are guilty until proven innocent. Google should tell you what is wrong with your site and give a period of time to repair. Do the peple that hand out these penalities know that they are putting people out of jobs? After all in my company they have made 4 people be without a job.

My thoughts on how Google should handle penalities is, to tell you that your site is breaking thier rules, and how. That in 24 hours your site will be penalised and if you want to appeal this that you can begin a process, which will keep you positioned during this appeal process. There could be a fee for this appeal. I can see that Google will have to do something similiar to this in the future, as there will be someone or some company that will mount a legal challenge to their policy.

My advice for anyone with a penality, forget trying to fix it and begin to work with Bing.

[netmeg]

Netmeg, how are Bing prices compared to Google usually? I can't buy the "mydomain name" keyword on Google and make money, just too much competition from cash rich start-ups and old timers. Maybe I should take time to set up a Bing acct and give it a shot.

Heavily niche dependent. And you can't get any separation from Yahoo, or even stats on Yahoo. And the interface is clunky. But overall, I certainly would advocate testing it.

[walkman]

I think it's two things

1. Bing/MSN users are older (and thus probably wealthier) - they got their hotmail account way back when and still use it and even search from within it. Or they search using defaults in I.E. What's more they trust the #1 listing, if it's No. 1 it must be good and they feel comfortable buying. G users are younger and less trusting.

2. There is no Instant on Bing - which means they serve the result only after the searcher has finished telling it exactly what they want - so the match is likely to be closer to what the searcher wants than G's guess based on a couple of letters. G's algo might be fine for the correct phrase, but G interrupts the customer from typing it in. Garbage search query in, garbage result out.

I haven't setup IE in a long time, last time I remember a list of them. Remember the default option also gets the 'uneducated and poor masses.'

For #2. There's a key ingredient missing: why is Google making them permanent if they produce 'garbage results' ? Even personalization is impossible to escape, unless you waste a minute typing &pws=0 at the of each search query. Who, other than a savvy webmaster, does that to check his rankings? The Instant was with an option for a while now it's even harder than &pws=0 and it resets after each search. In other words they are essentially mandatory for all but a few users. Why? No choice is surely not better for the users.

@netmeg,
thanks. I'll try it.

[AlyssaS]

^^ Instant was designed by the team that looks after the user interface and Google's "look". They are separate from the search team and probably talk to them even less than the Adsense team talks to the search team.

When they designed it, all they probably thought of was how cool it looked. And it does look cool - but it also interrupts the searcher when they type in queries. Which means that the searcher may stop too soon, and go off on a tangent, and thus get a set of results they didn't actually want (though the results served up may tie perfectly with what the little bit that was typed in).

Google is not a "joined-up" company. All their departments appear to function autonomously.

[affiliation]

One thing I have noticed about my Bing searches is they are busiest during the working day. I have put this down to the preinstalled Bing on their work computers.

[nomis5]

Aside from the top three then I've slowly been coming round to the idea that Yandex is the best. Yes, their results can be a bit weird occasionally but their SERPS are clutter free from sponsored ads and places and whatever.

They definitely have ambitions to become a world wide search engine and to my surprise they are beginning to make in roads into the western world. Give them a try, you may be surprised,

[robzilla]

odd - I thought it was about life after Google

Me too, until I started reading. It's mostly about giving Google a good bashing, either directly or indirectly by praising Bing into the high heavens. Don't forget that as soon as Bing starts gaining some decent ground on Google, you should expect to see those spectacular conversion rates go down and become similar to Google's. And do you honestly believe that Bing would give you a head's up, if they were to penalize your site? They're no different, really, so this is a pointless exercise. I empathize with the fact that you've lost a good source of income, I really do, but you're not grabbing the bull by the proverbial horns. "Life after Google" suggests to me that you've given up. What's the point of giving up, if you truly believe you've been wrongfully accused?

So I'm "trigger happy" because I smell guilt: nowhere do I see you really questioning this penalty. Look beyond things like duplicate content and the like. You weren't penalized because a Google employee accidentally bumped his elbow into a big red button after failing to do a wheelie on his office chair. There's likely something about your site that smells not just fishy, but downright rotten, to Google's algorithm, and it's your job to find out what it is. As tedster noted in another thread [webmasterworld.com] about the "manual checks" you think you've seen over the years, "there are many factors that might trigger a quick manual check and they don't all mean that some manual penalty is going to follow". Besides, if you think you've seen severals "checks" of your site, why didn't you sound the alarm?

My advice for anyone with a penality, forget trying to fix it and begin to work with Bing.

Unless you're in my niche, I advise you to do quite the opposite. Get to work -- if your site's worth it.

...with Googlebot gone, I have TONS more bandwidth and CPU for the actual users

Why didn't you set a custom crawl rate in Google Webmaster Tools, if Googlebot was hurting your site's performance this much?

[walkman]

@robzilla
No one takes advice from anon posters to stop worrying about Google anywa :). He might have meant that for certain sites it's over. Sites that might have been fine 1 month ago maybe, now Google doesn't want them anymore. Why? Doesn't matter. They decided so. End of story. They'll tolerate the same content model somewhere else, but not on yours. Go ahead and bang your head against the wall all you want.

As Google gets more into content and focuses on keeping even more clicks for themselves you may want to realize that they old rules are out. Of course their motivations on selectively enforcing the 'rules' are suspect since they are competing with many site owners and benefiting from many others. In other words, I don't buy everything that comes from Google public relations officers, sometimes also masqueraded as engineers.

[dickbaker]

I just thought I'd interject a comment about conversions, since my experience seems to be at odds with that of most others here.

Even after having my Google traffic reduced 50% by Panda 1.0, traffic from Google Shopping and Google organic still converts better than traffic from Bing or Yahoo. Google Adwords doesn't convert well at all.

I don't know what to make of that, but just thought I'd throw it out there.

[affiliation]

I started this thread to show a success story, not as a failure. I was not wanting to bash Google, I think there is nothing out there at the moment that I could ever make as much money from than Google.

What I was trying to put accross was, it is not the end when you get a penality. If your site was good enough to rank at the top of Google it most likely ranked at the top of Bing, (perhaps not everyone) so yes 90% less visitors but that did not mean an end to a very successful company, as Bing and now Yahoo still give them top place. If you start fiddling with your site after a Google penality there is no guarantee that Google will have you back, but it is possible that in your tinkering Bing may also drop you. That is the reason why I say forget about Google after a penality. I would take a slice of pie rather than no pie at all. Perhaps I am too cautious.


It would have been good to hear similiar stories, and I think we have comming to know that for most Bing converts better on a pro rata scale. If Bing can act as substitute and a good source of income I will take it.

So I'm "trigger happy" because I smell guilt

Of course their motivations on selectively enforcing the 'rules' are suspect since they are competing with many site owners and benefiting from many others

I was reluctant to make this thread talking about why my penality was given, but this is perhaps closer to my personal thoughts.

My site was top of the results for a very competitive set of search terms, and as was pointed out I have been getting manual checks for years. The reason I have come up with for this, is to advertise on G for the keywords I was top in are the most expensive in my industry, so Google would have to make sure of quality control in the natural results.

I accept my penality, I have had to deal with worse things in life, but I still think you should be told why and given the chance to do something about it before you are dropped.

[robzilla]

And yet it is. The end, that is. Or at least the beginning of the end. And it's not a success story, either. If you have an ever-increasing track record of Google penalties, perhaps it would be wise to have a critical look at your business model. Are you targeting these high-dollar keywords for a quick buck, and does it show when looking at the contents and the architecture of the site? Again, if Google penalized this site, there's a decent change that someday Bing will, too. On the short term, you're rightfully happy with the users that Bing and Yahoo send your way, but what if, half a year later, you lose out on those as well? You can go from one quick buck to the next, but that's gotta be a stressful enterprise, and no way to sustain yourself. Why not spend your time on building something that's algo-proof?

I still think you should be told why and given the chance to do something about it before you are dropped.

They'd be working against their own algorithm. If Google begins teaching individual webmasters what's fundamentally wrong with their sites, and how to lift or prevent a penalty, then that's pretty much the end of their search engine. Collect enough impending penalty cases, and you'll know exactly how to bend the rules to your advantage, and Google's disadvantage. They're thinking long term, and you should, too.

[courier]

If Google begins teaching individual webmasters what's fundamentally wrong with their sites, and how to lift or prevent a penalty, then that's pretty much the end of their search engine.

if Goog tld sites where they were going wrong would that not be education of a better internet?

[robzilla]

No, that'd be education on how to game their search engine. Besides, it's not their job to educate webmasters, but as far as they do, Panda was a brilliant move. Improving the quality of their search results tends to go hand in hand with teaching webmasters to give their users what they want, rather than focusing on filling their pockets with easy money. Making a quick buck is getting more difficult than ever, as it should.

[walkman]

^^ Instant was designed by the team that looks after the user interface and Google's "look". They are separate from the search team and probably talk to them even less than the Adsense team talks to the search team.

When they designed it, all they probably thought of was how cool it looked. And it does look cool - but it also interrupts the searcher when they type in queries. Which means that the searcher may stop too soon, and go off on a tangent, and thus get a set of results they didn't actually want (though the results served up may tie perfectly with what the little bit that was typed in).

Google is not a "joined-up" company. All their departments appear to function autonomously.

Alysa, personally I don't buy that. No doubt they have autonomy as in no supervisors checks them every 10 minutes on what they are doing but no $150-$200 BILLION company does that. All these are under "Search" and they have one executive that reports directly to the CEO. The idea that search quality will fill the web with posts bragging about improving speed by a few milliseconds and "users first" only to have the UI team ruin it, just makes no sense. The fact that Google made Instant and Personalization virtually mandatory shows that it's working perfectly for Google, and it must be worth all the negatives.

Remember, this is not some obscure product the higher ups may not know, it's the only one that makes money for Google and one that Googlers too, use it every single day. So, I'm thinking that personalization and instant are very profitable for Google.

[AlyssaS]

^^^ Well it was this comment from a G employee on Hacker news that made me think they are run quite differently from other $150-$200 billion cos:

[news.ycombinator.com...]

At the organizational level, Google is essentially chaos. In search quality in particular, once you've demonstrated that you can do useful stuff on your own, you're pretty much free to work on whatever you think is important. I don't think there's even a mechanism for shifting priorities like that.

If true it explains some of the peculiarities of G. Lots of things going on simultaneously. Some interesting stuff, like Google Street View, that wouldn't have been signed off in a traditional military style central-command type co. Other times some really odd stuff that doesn't work.

Also - no idea how the change in CEO is impacting their culture. Maybe Page is more of a control freak than that Schmidt guy. It's hard to tell as they are quite a secretive co. But my impression was always that g was the anti-apple - instead of being dominated by a single incredibly strong viewpoint, it's more diffuse.

But others on this forum probably know more about this than I do. Perhaps they'll chip in with their opinions.

[walkman]

Alyssa, I read that a while back and he does look like a decent guy. But I read it totally differently. In "search quality" probably there's no real task to do, "like we need to write code for a Q&A section so you do ..." so they might go to investigate certain spam reports or try to devise a new way to rank sites (signals) on their own. I think quite a few of them can hit the make /break button for individual sites but getting major changes live might require a committee of members.

UI changes are a totally different animal, Google will test to death even a shade of blue to make extra cash, let alone a major UI change that was announced with a major media campaign [wired.com...]

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

I can’t fault Google for this reliance on data. And I can’t exactly point to financial failure or a shrinking number of users to prove it has done anything wrong. Billions of shareholder dollars are at stake. The company has millions of users around the world to please. That’s no easy task.

[stopdesign.com...]
^ personal, non-profit blog so I hope it's Ok as link

[indyank]

I think the guys working for someone like lionbridge are more directly responsible for the quality of Google search results that we see today. It is the work of these guys that google probably equates to what their users like and dislike.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

2. There is no Instant on Bing - which means they serve the result only after the searcher has finished telling it exactly what they want - so the match is likely to be closer to what the searcher wants than G's guess based on a couple of letters. G's algo might be fine for the correct phrase, but G interrupts the customer from typing it in. Garbage search query in, garbage result out.

I agree with this.

The tradeoff for Google was that when you type a letter your browser sends what you've typed to Google for evaluation immediately. They gather data about what people almost typed in, even if no search is completed.

[drall]

We had a great site totally banned/removed 2 years ago. Perfect site, great validation, clean, vanilla onpage SEO, 11 years old, thousands of backlinks.

After weeks of research we could find NOTHING wrong. The only thing I found was some dead IBL's on some article sites that I could still see through cache and looked like lifted content from our site with heavy anchor SEO to our site.

These pages had all been removed at the same time. My best guess was someone made it look like we had been engaged in blackhat and then reeported our site and then removed their work.

My partner wanted us to file a reinclusion, I refused! We didnt do anything wrong and I am not going to bow to the almighty and say we did.

Guess what, last month the site and our traffic all came back. Site hasnt changed one bit from the day it was banned.

Google does make mistakes folks, honest sites do get harmed. Just the way it is and always will be as long as humans are involved.

[indyank]

It is strange to hear a 2 year banned site gets back all the traffic. I am saying this because you won't be linked in this time frame as the opportunities for others to find it are less. Traffic, CTR and all other ranking metrics would have been almost nullified. Yet the site could get back the same amount of traffic! I would have expected the competition to leave this site far behind in 2 years time. How could this happen?

[Edge]

I spent a few weeks pondering what was wrong with the site

My advice for anyone with a penality, forget trying to fix it and begin to work with Bing.

Affiliation,

I am late to this thread; however my perception is that you are probably doing something on your website Google does not agree with.

If I where you, I would hire or whatever a white hat SEO expert, have them analyze your website situation, report to you and then actually listen to what they have to say.

There is the chance that your perception of what is acceptable to Google is very different than what Google find acceptable.

I have running my high-traffic site for twelve years, am very white hat, never had a penalty…

[cabbie]

My sites don't disappear, never mind permanently. Never. Not in almost 10 years - not since I started. They don't even get algo bans.

Wheel how about putting your best, unshakeable website in your profile?
A boast like that needs some scrutiny I reckon.
:)

[jojy]

Here is a bing report:

My site impression is 136,110 impression and clicks are two. More or less impressions are same for 15 days. I contacted bing team and they replied

"Based on the investigation, the team did not see anything wrong with the discrepancy. The traffic you received according to our Product team is considered normal."

Do you call it normal or crazy?

[MediaGuy]

mmmm, having seen too many posts about

Help, I've been hit by Google penalty

seems those people obviously did something to ruffle G's feathers, and I'm referring to the ranking issues being a major hit.

I agree entirely that a website must be built for the user - NOT for search engines, event though content is very important, but ultimately, you need users to spread the word and buy from you.

This is the issue - I believe everyone relies so much on Google, they try little else in the way of web advertising, and its very sad, wrong but most of all its dumb, dumb, dumb putting eggs into one basket - you wouldnt put your entire savings with one bank account would you.... different banks offer different options, rates etc.

Keeping your advertising options open gives you ammunition, just incase the main provider goes bust or screws you over - just common sense. Google isnt the best anymore, I know too many engines who beat them big-time, these engines are owned by huge publishing companies that make millions by doing very simple things like eg: giving great value for money.

Many great websites out there, so many, yet everyone turns to over-priced adverts on Google. People talk about being great link builders, yeah? but they arent in reality, and it shows via the crazy ad-spend wasted every day. If they knew what they were doing, they could save a fortune on PPC alone by buying cheaper links elsewhere, then G penalties would be a thing of the past.

[walkman]

This is the issue - I believe everyone relies so much on Google, they try little else in the way of web advertising, and its very sad, wrong but most of all its dumb, dumb, dumb putting eggs into one basket - you wouldnt put your entire savings with one bank account would you.... different banks offer different options, rates etc.

True but it's much easier for the web to stand up to a monopoly that's holding the internet hostage--for money--now that they reached the market share by hiding their true intentions. We wouldn't have to depend so much on Google if Google didn't hold 65%-95% of thew search market.

Asking not depend on search engines is like saying tie both your hands, given that most people use SEs to find stuff on the internet. Maybe we should have more competition and while we get that, Google should be forced to limit their behavior, given that it is a monopoly. Spread the world and pray that FTC and EU crack down on their anti-competitive practices. Google was the first to (rightfully) whine about MSFT in late 1990's and now (as thieving cry babies) about Android.

Make no mistake, Google is now competing with your content, and it will get worst. Unless your content doesn't monetize well for the effort put in, of course. Then, they'll call that unique and rank #1, er, #1 after 4-5 Google ads, 4-5 youtube videos, 4-5 G images, 7 G Local results, 4-5 G News headlines and maybe 4-5 Google Offers. It's called "changing the world," in GoogleSpeak.

[dvduval]

Yea, we too have clearly the leading product in our niche. I say "leading" because more people buy our product than those that outrank them. More websites have our product installed. We have 10 times more links pointing to our site. We have the largest community compared with competing products. There are more "widgets" for our product than the others, etc. etc.

But google did some kind of strange penalty. We still rank for our brand name, but not for the product type. It's been a year.

We have been able to match the sales we had before the penalty with email campaigns (more of them), and continuing to offer more to our customers. The last couple of months have been among our best.

We have been focusing more on Facebook and Bing, and hoping that they will continue to increase their market share. Just as google seems to be supporting what gives them money over serving the best search results, we must also focus our efforts on those sites and marketing strategies that serve us best.

Oh, and I completely ended Google Adwords, and we are actually selling more now (through altering our marketing allocation elsewhere). Next steps will likely include using more and more products from other providers. For example:
1. Switch to Bing webmaster tools and analytics
2. integrate Facebook widgets more and more (already well under way)
3. Increase advertising on facebook and bing
4. Replace adsense with things like Viglink and Amazon (already under way)

If at some juncture google can prove they are wanting to provide traffic, maybe we will give them some consideration, but it is obvious my views are shared among many. It's not some isolated penalty. Instead it is a move to provide traffic to large corporations, and google is a corporation run by stockholders now.

[mrguy]

It is strange to hear a 2 year banned site gets back all the traffic.

I had 4 sites that were demoted to the -100 oblivion 2 years ago. I did not touch them and they all just recently returned to where they were before the demotion.

With Google, nothing is stange.

[zeus]

Yes google just have to much power, that they really have to tell a website owner whats the trouble.
I will also say I focus more on Bing after Panda which also ruined my sites after 7 years of good ranking, but in a way Im happy, be cause now I really need to focus on Bing, where I would rather have my traffic come from there you are not in such a big risk, with all those weird shake ups in serps and the ranking at google is also not much better anymore.

[whatson]

Lets face it, Google's penalties are not entirely fair, and do not necessarily create an even playing field. Sure there are many sites breaking the T&C's that have not been busted yet, but inevitably will one day. But its also the sites that are buying links that make it really unfair. So do we turn to the grey side, and start buying links to compete? Only to find they suddenly include something new in their algo to rememedy link purchasing?

Like most of you I also experienced 7 figure hit in Florida and Panda. It's painful, but you do what you can and move on, only to learn. This is our industry, if you can't take the heat, get out of the internet.

[wheel]

Wheel how about putting your best, unshakeable website in your profile?

What's the upside for me on that? Preening my feathers? People that know me know my site, other than that I've no wish for it to be public.

Besides, I'm not talking one site, I've got numerous sites, many that rank throughout the years. Others I'd be embarrassed to show my mother :).

[CainIV]

My sites don't disappear, never mind permanently. Never. Not in almost 10 years - not since I started. They don't even get algo bans.

That's fantastic, and hat's off to you, but this doesn't mean that permanent lifetime bans are either appropriate or fair.

Just like in the real court system, if Google wants to be fair there will be fair appeal (which there is not)