Confession: How I Got SLAMMED By Google!

[robvegas626]

I confess, I had a bunch of autoblogs running with WP-Robot. I heard that Google was going to crack down on these types of sites, and I thought I'd taken the necessary precautions, but yesterday they completely de-indexed a bunch of my sites. Including some big money sites of mine. BAM! It was swift and harsh.

I'm deleting all of those crappy blogs. Does anyone have experience with re-submitting a site for reconsideration? I could care less about the autoblogs, but I've got some precious sites that got de-indexed as part of their sweep -- I assume because they were on the same domain.

A longshot, I know...but when I submit my request I want to do the best job possible.

P.S. The lesson I've taken from this? Google is way smarter than most marketers give them credit for. I was building tons of back links and spinning articles like crazy, but I still could not outrank ORIGINAL CONTENT. Even if the original content was a couple of years old -- I still couldn't beat their ranking. It forces me to question whether ANYTHING that we do automatically (i.e. software) makes a difference in the long run.

I had some great rankings before and I saw results from all the money I was shelling out (for Google Annihilator 2.0 or whatever the "flavor of the week" was), but truly original content was always kicking my butt. Time to roll up my sleeves and go back to WRITING instead of trying to exploit some loophole...putting on my white hat now

[K_tir]

Oh no, very bad news... There must be a way to avoid this...

[thebitbotdotcom]

Originally Posted by robvegas626

I confess, I had a bunch of autoblogs running with WP-Robot. I heard that Google was going to crack down on these types of sites, and I thought I'd taken the necessary precautions, but yesterday they completely de-indexed a bunch of my sites. Including some big money sites of mine. BAM! It was swift and harsh.

I'm deleting all of those crappy blogs. Does anyone have experience with re-submitting a site for reconsideration? I could care less about the autoblogs, but I've got some precious sites that got de-indexed as part of their sweep -- I assume because they were on the same domain.

A longshot, I know...but when I submit my request I want to do the best job possible.

P.S. The lesson I've taken from this? Google is way smarter than most marketers give them credit for. I was building tons of back links and spinning articles like crazy, but I still could not outrank ORIGINAL CONTENT. Even if the original content was a couple of years old -- I still couldn't beat their ranking. It forces me to question whether ANYTHING that we do automatically (i.e. software) makes a difference in the long run.

I had some great rankings before and I saw results from all the money I was shelling out (for Google Annihilator 2.0 or whatever the "flavor of the week" was), but truly original content was always kicking my butt. Time to roll up my sleeves and go back to WRITING instead of trying to exploit some loophole...putting on my white hat now

Welcome back friend. Prepare yourself mentally. It is going to be a long hard road back, but I think you made the right choice for us all...

[Zachmo]

sorry to hear that but I guess its part of our world. Good luck with your new plans!

[sammytoga]

I would probably leave some of them alone. I have had sites get de-indexed, and then come back stronger a week or few weeks later. It's the "Google Dance"

[robvegas626]

Originally Posted by sammytoga

I would probably leave some of them alone. I have had sites get de-indexed, and then come back stronger a week or few weeks later. It's the "Google Dance"

You have had sites get totally de-indexed, and then come back?

I've seen my sites drop down in the rankings due to a "google dance," but I have never seen them get de-indexed. Any thoughts?

[Boris_yo]

@robvegas626

1. Did you have all your sites in Google Webmaster Tools?
2. Were your autoblogs good quality?
3. Were all your sites on subdomains?

[Supafly]

Google is going after low-level content scraper sites, the kind that are often sold in the WF. That's what your autoblogs were. You can read about it a bit in Matt Cutts' blog. Also here.

[robvegas626]

Yes, all the sites were in Webmaster Tools. They were low quality and they were on sub domains. It was foolish, but I learned.

[robvegas626]

But....if this is only a Google Dance, and they come back, I will be very happy. I've heard of sites dropping in the SERPs and coming back strong, but I've never heard of sites being de-indexed and coming back. I hope for the best.

[mike959100]

Well i will be one to learn from your lesson, i am done with the linkwheel auto blog stuff and deleting it now. wow thanks for the advice. I use wp-o-matic and it doesnt run everyday but still last thing i want is google seeking that thing out

[GeckoTribe]

Originally Posted by robvegas626

It forces me to question whether ANYTHING that we do automatically (i.e. software) makes a difference in the long run.

Unless you've got the chops and resources to create an automated system that produces REAL value (eg. Google News -- their system automatically analyzes huge amounts of news and picks the stuff that's most likely to be of general interest for their homepage), then in the long run, I'd say definitely not. The search engines have people who are smarter than any of us, whose job it is to squash attempts to get undeserved high rankings.

In the short term, sure, there are ways to game the system. But the long term, there are only two strategies: create real value, or commit yourself to an eternal battle where your soldiers are constantly getting slaughtered. I don't know about you, but the latter doesn't sound like much fun to me.

[azmanar]

Hi,

When you have money, you get different treatment.

Google does the break-dance only with low end sites. And sometimes on high-end sites after they got reported in the PRESS ( like recently ).

Before the press, the dance was different. Miss Google was belly dancing because they throw wads of dollars to the dance floor.

Typical anywhere.


Let me confess as well : I never give a sh^t about Google or SEs.

I have a few blogs with plain old original content for unique interests.

Visitors are mainly enthusiasts of the subjects I write. They know me mainly from Forums and Yahoo Groups. So never need any SEO or promotions for my traffic. Just my simple old signatures.

After a while spiders came and kept crawling daily. Got thousands of backlinks in SEs.

Interestingly later on, almost 80% of my visitors came from SEs and the rest are from Forums, Yahoo Groups and Blog backlinks. Some sites got PR4.

Only recently I joined CPA networks to monetize my blogs. So I have to start doing some SEOs to scale up and hasten result.

[Boris_yo]

Originally Posted by azmanar

Google does the break-dance only with low end sites. And sometimes on high-end sites after they got reported in the PRESS ( like recently ).

Can you provide source of that information?

[TryBPO]

Congratulations on being honest about your approach here! So many talk about being slapped and fail to mention the black hat techniques that caused it to begin with, heh.

Time to dust off that white hat and get back to work!...good luck!

[dtommy79]

So I guess it's the end for wp-robot and the other automation softwares.

[momo3]

It aint no dance, You were deindexed.
If you go to site:domainnamehere.com you're gone.

Sorry man it happened to me too.
But it was a regular site with WP robot and I was just trying to get some "activity". Stupid move of mine.

I did get a reconsideration and they claimed they read it but nothing ever happened.

[azmanar]

Originally Posted by Boris_yo

Can you provide source of that information?

Hi Boris,

This isn't news anymore.

Here's the link : http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/bu...8kAJ+U0jGOowLg

[JSProjects]

Was your entire blog scraped content, or just a portion of it? I've been using WP-o-Matic from time to time to create RSS news pages. I'm interested to find out if Google is going after sites that have partially scrapped content or just sites that are purely scraped content.