Senior Member
joined:June 2, 2006
posts:2218
votes: 7
How can we answer real questions without discussing real data?
Webmasterworld (WW) is what is says, not so much PPC world. At the bottom of this site it says 1996-2010.
Now, bare with me, don't take my upper words as something to swipe you away.
The only reason why members are not allowed to post their own stuff here is because WW wants to prevent the exploitation and misuse of the forum for the benefit of dishonest individuals and companies.
Imagine if a forum with the WW's pedigree features posts with links to different sites?
As bunch of crooks would start posting (read lying) about their products, way bigger bunch of people would figure they did not get from a product what they expected, nor what was said at the famous WW.
That would be the end of the serious forum.
I witnessed posts that would get locked as moderators would figure somebody was trying to play naive in order to promote product or service like a web hosting company.
Many would pay a lot to get links to their sites from here. I saw my posts showing in Google an hour after I created them. Google is constantly crawling this site.
Maybe Brett has one of Google's servers under his desk, ha?! :))
I'm not saying WW is the #1, but it does have its reputation.
I believe your ways of sharing the real stuff with people that hang around here are:
- by having people confirm it's OK to sticky them
- by posting your site's link in Review my Site [
webmasterworld.com...] (check the rules)
In regards of what you described, it may be that Google does not want you to identify with their product.
Since fairly recently (few months), Google's big campaign was to smash those that tried to monetize on Google's brand - in a bad and treachery way. In short, they would hook up people on earn so much by working from home for Google, just send your address and some money and you'll get the form or whatever.
Plus, Google has sharpened their whole PPC engine in general when about QS, and the system is catching (sometimes human manual reviewers) more stuff that Google has determined to be wrong, i.e., sites with malicious code, affiliate sites without useful content, email harvesters, sites that redirect visitors to other sites to finish their purchase, subscription, or whatever process, and so on.
Finally, you said FREE, a magic words that Google has become very sensitive to lately. Just because, most of free turns out not to be.
It also happens that Google makes mistakes about some sites. I'm sure some folks are seeing worse sites than theirs. Nobody knows for sure if they will go "under" as well, or what makes the difference between the two.
I understand your frustration, but don't let it take you away from your problem.
And trust me, all of us here screamed at Google not once, but many times. Some of my own posts were quite bad.
As I said few times before, Google AdWords is an animal without head or tail, a constant mutant that had you get caught in one of its round corners. ;)
Cheers
[edited by: bill at 8:47 am (utc) on Feb 23, 2010]
[edit reason] See sticky [/edit]