Google make me laugh

If I weren't laughing I'd be crying.

Google really are frustrating. I had an amazon "review" site with a number of reviews on and some other related articles. Anyway the site was probably 6 months old and was sitting around page 2 for the main keyword when I decided to build some links to it.

Long story short, it gradualy moved up and hit #1 just into the new year and in that time made about $200. It sat there for around 2 weeks then disappeared. Anyway I wasn't worried, just thought it would come back in a few days, but it didn't.

I checked site:www.mysite.com and sure enough I'd been deindexed. I don't use webmaster tools because I try to give them bar stewards as little info as possible. So anyway I think I'll add the site now to see what it says. I add the site to webmaster tools and apparently my site is "pure spam" and I need to sort it out.

I haven't got the time or desire to bow down to G and grovel so I just binned the domain and put the site on a new one. I'm not redirecting the old site or anything like that I'm just starting afresh with the original content and doing a few things different.

One thing I did was I cloaked the amazon links before, not to hide anything but just because they look more tidy. I'm not this time.

Another thing was that a manual reviewer would likely spot 1 of the articles was obviously copied and rewritten from another site even though it passed copyscape, whatever good that is. So I won't be using that article this time, the others are all unique.

Other than that, that's all I can think of that might have been wrong. I would say they also counted my backlinks against the site but I'm pretty sure they haven't.

It's not the fact that my site was deindexed what is frustrating but the fact it only happened when I hit the top spot and was taking their traffic. The only real things that were wrong as far as I can tell were the 1 article, and cloaking affiliate links. Still I have the idea that no matter how willingly I play by those bar stewards rules they'll still find a reason to penalise a site that monetises any of their traffic, unless I'm paying for it, but we'll wait and see.

I know it's annoying when it happens, I mean I've been penalised before not deindexed, but it's kind of fun really, like a game of cat and mouse, don't you think?