What is Digg?100 Comments
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+160"Google Hell is the worst fear of the untold numbers of companies that depend on search results to keep their business visible online."
And that's the problem, isn't it. Their business depends on search results. One of the first things they teach you about opening up your own business is that if you don't advertise it, no one will come to you. Well, these people don't advertise. They rely on another company to advertise for them (for free), a company that is under no obligation to do this at all.
Google is a resource for searchers, not for people who want to be found by the searchers. If you don't like this arrangement, learn how to ADVERTISE. - Rayonic, on 10/12/2007, -3/+111> "In retrospect, Sanar thinks he can trace his problem to a search marketing consultant he had paid $35,000 to improve Skyfacet's Google rankings."
Ding ding ding, we have a winner! Google punishes people who try to game the system. Plain and simple.
99% of affected sites absolutely deserve it. To the 1% wrongfully caught up in it, that's lousy, but Google does not owe you a good ranking. They aren't a public utility and they aren't a monopoly. They're just popular.
Heck, you can say they've become popular *because* of their aggressive filtering policy. - typo180, on 10/12/2007, -8/+89No offense, but relying on Google hits seems like a horrible business model.
- titlesaysitall, on 10/12/2007, -7/+67Tonight, we dine in Google Hell!
- mrfoos2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+45"In retrospect, Sanar thinks he can trace his problem to a search marketing consultant he had paid $35,000 to improve Skyfacet's Google rankings. He now believes the consultant mistakenly replicated content on many of the site's pages, making them look like duplicate--that is, spam--content."
SEO company mistakenly replicated content? Yeah right!
Live by the sword. Die by the sword. I'm sick of SEO content copiers and the companies that support them. I hope he never gets his rankings back. - unreal32, on 10/12/2007, -1/+41Forbes couldn't find any better examples of sites in Google Hell? Both sites given as examples deserved to be there since they tried to game their index ranking by their own admission. One guy tried to create a ton of pages with identical content, and another guy paid to be in a link farm. Guess what, I don't want to go to that site, Google SHOULD rank it lower.
And who the hell buys diamonds over the Internet?!? - threemonkeydust, on 10/12/2007, -0/+32Exactly! He got what he deserved. If you've got good content, it'll go up anyway. Don't play games with Google, because Google will bite you. And I won't be giving you any sympathy.
- keathmilligan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+31I'm not sure what the "mystery" is here. All of the cases mentioned in this article did things that Google specifically tells you not to do if you want good page rank. 1 had massive amounts of duplicate content, another paid an SEO to try game Google and got caught and another paid for links and got caught.
- skeeve, on 10/12/2007, -3/+31@dragonex
"He paid a consultant $35,000 for him to improve the rankings, among other things. Doesn't sound like "Free" to me." You just said it yourself. He paid $35,000 to a consultant. Not Google. Google is free. What he did was pay somebody to basically show him how to try and cheat this free service. So in addition to being an idiot, he was trying to cheat the system, and deserves what he gets. - user0533, on 10/12/2007, -1/+27One page with less ads:
http://www.forbes.com/2007/04/29/sanar-google-skyfacet-tech-cx_ag_0430googhell_print.html - JamesWilson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+25And artificially priced. I can't wait for the bottom to drop out of the diamond business.
- matteusx, on 10/12/2007, -2/+26Thanks. I immediately left the site when some streaming video ad started talking to me and its pause/mute buttons didnt work. The interstitial ad was bearable, but that wasn't. What a POS site.
- StillGaming, on 10/12/2007, -5/+23I'm sorry, what I meant to say was, "Uncyclopedia was never banned. Google did nothing wrong. Steve Jobs. Apple. Ubuntu. Bush sucks."
My fingers must've slipped. - BlackAdderIII, on 10/12/2007, -1/+191. Google search results are other people's information. If you want to exploit that, and contaminate other people's data for a few pennies, you have no reason to whine when you rightly get the chop. Pay for advertising like everyone else does.
2. I'm sick of sites floating to the top of google search results, LYING about whether they contain relevant content, and when you click, there's a holding page for that search result. Google seem to have worked it so that happens less. Good.
3. Unscrupulous SEO companies have meant that professional web developers are FREQUENTLY told they have to violate search engine TOS or don't get the contract. The SEO "industry" ruins the credibility of web shops and professionals.
Spamming Google is the same as spamming mailboxes, inconsiderate, selfish, vandalism of other people's internet use for your own personal gain. - Terminaltor, on 10/12/2007, -3/+21Don't care if I'm banned.
Digg just deleted the 16,000 +dugg thread to bend over to HD-DVD
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 - DulcetTone, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17Can someone explain to me how EVERY fungible commerce site deserves to be among the first page or two of results? It seems to imply that everyone can be on page 1 of the phonebook.
tone - huckmank, on 10/12/2007, -5/+21Glad to hear that the two people they mentioned getting screwed were both diamond sellers. Karma came to kick their asses for dealing in a blood-soaked product.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16Head of Web Spam at Google Matt Cutts has posted about this.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-hell/
Funnily enough the guys complaining to Forbes were spammers with link farms. Who would have guessed? - wwwdot1jesdotus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15Nobody, now.
- metamorfoza, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13I can't see what the problem is. With exception to the last dude, those other guys used "marketing consultants" "to improve Google rankings", in other words, they were spamming with link farms and trkicking Google spider with "mistakenly replicated content on many of the site's pages".
I understand that is hard for start up company to get in the top 10, but if you get into this heaven by cheating.. then don't be surprised if Google Archangels kick you out and condemns you to hell when it finds out . - wwwdot1jesdotus, on 10/12/2007, -10/+23My business site has had the same thing happen. Of course it was my fault, but I didn't catch it until it was too late. I've been trying to get my site visible again for over a year now with no avail.
Consequently, my business has slowed almost %50 since last year (this is not good for a startup company). - lordsandwich, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Er, did this budding millionaire actually bother buying text ads on Google rather than merely relying on the usual search results? If not, cry me a ***** river. If you run a commercial site, you should be willing to put up cash to market it.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Yes, but he talked to sites that were spammers so it kinda defeats the point of the article.
- flink405, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10That´s why Google sells ad space.
Anybody that relies solely on a free search engine to drive their business should not be in business. - wild, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12No its not:
http://www.google.com/search?q=uncyclopedia.org&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official - TeatimeGrommit, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10@pkonink
Actually, the diamonds being sold online are the artificial ones. Jewelers won't stock 'em 'cause they're clearer and more consistent than natural stones (just as a plastic chair is more consistent than a chair made of sticks) but cost significantly less (as a cotton blanket from a factory is cheaper than a hand-woven blanket, other things being equal).
The DeBeers always threatened to flood the market to the point that diamonds would be $100 / carat if the artificial diamond guys moved from diamond tipped blades into jewelry. Well, now they can make those stones for less than $100 / carat... - dattaway, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Do ads from hell put a page in google hell?
- fizgigtiznalkie, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11agreed, SEO companies know they will get lower results for keyword loading and content duplication and for putting meta data in that doesn't match the page content
ever since companies started putting Jenny McCarthy and Pam Anderson in their meta tags in the mid-nineties search engines have been punishing companies trying to spoof them for the good of the search results - pogfreak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8spending $35,000 to *someone else* to jack up your google rating is probably the dumbest thing Ive heard all year. Imagine what that money could buy through legit advertising channels. Unbelievable!
- johnshooter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Dumb question but how does one know he/she is in Google Hell? How did this guy find out what pages "offended Google"?
Someone is going to think this is a really dumb quesiton...go ahead and digg me down. - spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Penalized sites get something like +30 added to their Google ranking so that they will never appear on the first 2 pages of results. Really bad sites are omitted from the index entirely.
And chances are this guy knows very well what Google didn't like. He did his best to change the wording on his pages and buy links from other sites, and Google perceived this to be spammy. Google wants to reward the sites with the most relevant content, not the sites that are best crafted for Google. - HomerS1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7The author seems to lament that Google does not make clear their page-ranking algorithms. Well, duh. If they did then every Tom, Dick, and SEO would simply abuse the system and make page rankings meaningless (if all pages are #1 then they also are all also #999,999)
- ZeroMP, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7"I know they're trying to get rid of sites with no practical purpose," he says. " But when your pages get dumped, you lose half your traffic and a lot of money." -- Some douche from the article.
Hey, douche-rocket, try this on: Maybe you shouldn't be relying so heavily on Google to do all of your advertising for you huh? Maybe if you had a unique product or service or did some real advertising people would know to go to your website without using "the google".
It always pisses me off when some asshat starts crying about his google ranking getting *****. Piss off dude Google doesn't owe you ***** and the whole point of their algorithm is to provide users with USEFUL results by sites who are not cheating. This one asshat in the article pays $35,000 to some douchebag to up his google ranking and instead gets it sent to Google hell?! Hilarious - I can't get enough. - abstractia, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6novagenesis - the top listings in Google aren't for sale by Google. They want to keep their results un-polluted for good reason and they want ads clearly separated from real content. That's why you get punished. It was a shady practice to try to buy that rank through SEO - what essentially amounts to a black market for search engine position. If you want to rank highly, produce good content. That's all there is to it.
It would be unethical for Google to sell top search positions and not disclose them as advertisements. In effect, that's what the SEO's are trying to do. - ryannerd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5When your online sales plummet after you hire a SEO, or pay someone to include your site in their link farm. Then you know you are in Google Hell.
- emom, on 10/12/2007, -11/+16I have to say this was a really good explanation of why supplemental Google results are a problem - I've heard about it before but didn't understand the severity of it until I read this - thanks Dimmerswitch. :)
- johnshooter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Thanks Ryan. I realize how this guy was an idiot but the article says he made changes and got rid of the pages Google didn't like. I was just curious how the hell he knew what pages Google didn't like? Do they have a webmaster tool or something that says why pagerank is low?
- ogletree, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6That is a very good article. Anybody who owns a website should read it. The writer seems to know a lot about seo. He also was smart enough to interview 3 of the top SEO's in the business.
- WhiteCloud, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Have to agree with the consensus here. If you are going to try to game Google don't cry when you get caught and penalized for it. And anyone who is relying on a free listing in something as unpredictable as search engine natural listings for all of their marketing are making a big mistake. It is best to consider natural search traffic as a bonus aspect of a real marketing plan. I have seen countless sob stories about businesses who relied on this traffic for most of their business and when it went away they had nothing. Business owners need to treat an online business as they would a traditional offline business or they are doomed to fail.
- bradleyland, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Funny you should ask. When I was researching Active Directory backup tools, the paid results turned out to be very useful. Depending upon what you're looking for, it really pays to have a quick look at the paid results.
- npearson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I have had this happen with a non-profit and it is a long and painful process only fixed quickly one way... Ad words. Don't scam the system and be shocked when you get caught. You probably got the attention of De Beers... Lucky your still alive!
- thebaron2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@diggingaround
Revenue /= Profit
Not even CLOSE. - jgzman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4If they wanted to be guaranteed a front-page placement, they could have, oh, I don't know, paid Google? Possibly they would have to pay more, but thems the breaks.
Clearly they understood enough to know that a good Google-rank is good, but not enough to understand that Google doesn't like people buggering the system. Old computer saying about how a little knowledge is more dangerous than a lot comes to mind. - skeeve, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Sorry they can't get the spelling of Pouchituatteian Dr. right. Those bastards. I mean seriously how hard is Pouchituateian to spell?
- ScottMitchell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@novagensis: If AdWords was such a waste of money, it wouldn't attract the bounty of advertisers and wouldn't constitute like 90% of Google's revenue. Just because _you_ don't click on the ads in Google searches doesn't mean others don't. Moreover, since advertisers only pay for click-thrus (not views), even if only a tiny percentage of searchers clicked on the ads, what would it matter? You're only paying for those coming to your site in the first place.
- sahala, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@johnshooter
check out http://www.google.com/webmasters/. You'll find a discussion forum and a set of tools, among other things. - willcode4beer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"Google allows businesses to build up sales...."
huh? Google doesn't allow or disallow my (or anybody else's) business to do anything. - pogfreak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Google owes you dumbasses nothing. Its there for me (the searcher) not you (the prick who thinks he's clever to game the system so his site gets more hits). You play with fire you get burned: you just lost the best source of free traffic to your site. Your loss, not mine, not google's. Looks like you'll have to man up and do the unthinkable: pay for advertising space!
- willcode4beer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2or sue your "SEO Consultant"
can't help but wonder if the $35k wouldn't have gone further as ads instead... - Ruhtar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The court order to demand the turning over of your IP address and time of posting is being prepared as we speak.
Have a nice day.
Muahahahahahahah!!! -
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