I guess the lesson here is don't add spammy sites to WMT.

A pop under is obvious spam, even If that has nothing to do with your penalty.

I do not add any of my sites to GWT, spammy or not. It is just a doorway to get more info on your SEO activities. If you do SEO then you are violation Google's TOS. If you add any google code to your site you just give them access to more than they should have to.

This is what I believe, true or not. I do not trust Google as far as I can throw a stick at them, especially any of their code anywhere close to any of my sites.

Very simple - don't use Google at all for anything, when you go on a first date do you tell a girl your life's story so she can run a mile instantly, that is what you do when you use Google Analytics, sitemaps, and all the other niceties they provided for you - means they don't have scurry around the internet finding it - you did all the hard work for them. This all comes from multi-national consultants who put sites first page next to the top retailers - organically - we use their hosting architecture which is derived from the same architecture companies like Saks and Vogue use - rapid indexing & ranking - like catnip to Google. They recommended not to use Google for anything 2-3yrs ago to us, funny how it has taken that long to affect the mainstream - all the other updates Google did in 2010/11 must be hitting the mass market about now as well then.

We'll just give you an example as we already know people will jump on board with their "Google isn't out to get you comments". We saw a test site they implemented on first gen hosting to validate the hosting architecture ($2,100/mth) - now on second gen - new domain - no marketing (well a tweet every couple of days) - 30,000 products on Magento CE - off the shelf theme - same fashion products that the top retailers have with short tail keywords - no ppc - took a few weeks and 15,000 pages indexed on the site with first page Google ranking next to Amazon, eBay, Saks, Hugo Boss. Then they reduced the hosting clusters down, pages dropped off top ranking, put it back to the original - back to first page within a week or so. Cool.

So people will say, $25K for hosting, that's stupid - but, most sites have 8% of revenue marketing budgets so if you can rank your pages with zero marketing then you only need $300,000 revenue to justify the cost and you get to rank next to the top retailers - organically - thereby avoiding the Google dance and minimising the impact of any Google updates. That is where it gets interesting.

I thought it was obvious enough, if you are trying to game Google why would you provide them with info that makes it easy for them to punish you and take everything away from you.

If its a manual penalty, those sites are pretty much a goner. Try a reconsideration request but it will probably take months and even then a long time to get them back up to where they were before. Good luck mate

serpyre, to hide your hosting, you can host your site at cloudflare and get their ips.

There is nothing to do with penalties and web masters tools. your site get penalized even it is not listed in WHT. Don't always rely on Google Traffic. Make alternatives for traffic like social media, networking and various other methods. Always have a plan B with you.

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vishwa , yes i didnt say you will not get a penalty if you dont add your site to the GWT,thats not the point here.
but in my case my other sites ( even parked domains that where on my account where manually penalized ) because they where on the same account.

@pfoaf - what are you talking about?

serpyre, when you host a website on cloudflare, you ip changes (US IP), and google dosent know where you are hosted.

So Google will use CloudFlare as the basis with all the other numpty sites - which is worse as you will be running at Tier 7 Siteground levels - that's not including the latency to get the dynamic content, funny comment though - put a smile on our faces.

i dont quite understand what do you mean serpyre. cloudflare is used by very big sites and has a good repuation. google wont demote you based on hosting if you are hosted there. in the case you cant get a proper hosting.

@pfoaf - nothing related to yourself but education is rather painful at SME levels as their going in position is to use the exception to prove the rule - see this Website down from 19 -> 273!!!

So just to clarify - 95-99% of CloudFlare will be at the Free and Pro levels, the rest will make up a tiny fraction. A large site will have other aspects to it that will mitigate CloudFlare usage, ultimately it is not smart as their architecture is flawed but there you go. It is a dillution effect, the larger the site normally the less the impact a stupid decision has, CloudFlare is a bolt on to a flawed architecture - and Google knows it - how using it impacts a site is site specific - however for the majority it will not 'overall' be positive.

You are thinking direct, but Google works on an indirect basis, you can't see it or touch it or quantify it, but it's there. Anwyay, that's enough, we found out the other day SMEs have absolutely no idea how the big companies roll so there is no point anymore explaining it or what effect it has on them.

It's there so they can generate revenue, they generate 70% of that via Adwords, if you think they are your friend you are very naïve. So the trick is not to be their friend nor be their enemy - just be neutral - and that means avoiding the tools.

The multi-national consultants we mentioned above just gave us this, we are 99% sure everyone will say - but that's impossible or I know an exception - this is how it is - like it - lump it - we don't care - but stop trying to annoy us when we are trying to help with information from the consultants that know how Google work - because in the medium to long term they will -always- be right - that is why they’re the multi-national enterprise architects with companies like Renault.

Take your hosting amount $80/mth by 1% is $8,000/mth revenue by $127 per order is 63 orders per month by 2.5% conversion rate is 2,500 visitors per month at 100% of optimal -only- using Technical SEO no marketing or Business SEO - that is the baseline regardless of your sites conversion rates or average order size.

Tier 1/2 Hosting will hit 80-95% of 2,500 (only available to the corporates - we use it)
Tier 3/4 Hosting will hit 50-80% of 2,500 (Nexcess, Peer1)
Tier 5/6 Hosting will hit 20-50% of 2,500 (Sonassi, SimpleHelix)
Tier 7 Hosting will hit <20% of 2,500 (Siteground)

The difference between those figures and your site is: the amount of Business SEO (time) you must spend to make up the difference either manually or via automation tools - which includes your non-income generating learning time; the number of products; whether you are national or international; your platform; conversion rate; and a few other factors. So if you are on Siteground at $20/mth you can expect $400 revenue and 125 visitors per month via Technical SEO if everything is 100% optimally balance, the rest is your effort and time.

We can confirm the stats - two different sites that we calculated this are hitting it exactly: first at 80% on ~9,000 visitors per month no marketing or Business SEO (on Tier 1/2) - and another historic site on SimpleHelix hitting ~2,000 per month on $50/mth hosting (Tier 5/6) (750 visitors baseline) - the reason why it is almost triple the baseline - there were 8-10 language specific country stores for international sales - so it boosted visitors number 3 fold.

That is why the enterprise companies use clusters and Tier 1/2 providers, they -only- need to put 5-20% of their effort in backlinks, press release & social media compared to SMEs who need to put in 80% effort. That is why enterprise companies have 5-10:1 revenue:effort models compared to SMEs who have 1:1 (if they are lucky these days) revenue:effort models. As the enterprises put the squeeze on SMEs that will move to 1:2 - meaning you need to create ever more backlinks - which you can't do - so you will be driven to ppc to generate the traffic. So full circle Google gets their revenue by being your 'friend'.

It's as simple as that.

How is this even a thread. Everyone knows you don't connect money sites if you're doing aggressive link building to them. No analytics, no adsense, no WMT footprints, no WHOIS info. Thought we all knew this by now.

adding site to WMT is okay and it is totally worthy if you are in white hat path. but if you do spam and if you in black hat path you should worry about adding your site to WMT

It's good that I've read this thread. We are planning to build new sites and I intend, of course, to add them up to our Google webmaster tool account. It's a new learning to read everyone's comments above. I guess it's easier for Google to target what you are doing when you are giving them direct info. This is a saver right here. I won't do the same mistake. Thank God.

It is up to everyone to make their own decisions and take the consequences of those on the chin. When you save time short term you are usually doing that at the expense of medium & long term - there is always a price. By giving Google the keys to your front door you are stating that you trust them implicitly - we don't - primarily because they make 70% of their revenue by Adwords so we are unable to determine with any clarity if that information is used against us being that they are a data mining company - regardless of whether it is malicious or by circumstance. But that is just our view and those of consultants working alongside Google at the top retailers. There is no black and white, only how much grey is too much for you.

Never thought of this.

Ive now removed a lot of my sites from google estates.

I certainly makes sense to do it now. I mean, You almost tell google what you are trying to do.

Then go and read post #24 and that is how you get them to come knocking at your door rather than giving them the key.

CloudFlare is a hack for a decent architecture, sure you might have a handful of large sites, but when you get to enough volume you always have exceptions to publish - same for Shopify and all the other SME tools.

~25% of order traffic comes from organic, so you have to treat Google with respect and putting a CDN in front which is used by the mass market has one result - you are dumped in with the crowd - social media being ~1-2% of order traffic is not going to help you - no matter what the service providers say.

So sure, CloudFlare works if you want to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to built up your visitor count and social profile manually instead of running the business - but that does not translate in to sales - in the end that is what it is all about. Ignoring Google who in effect control ~40% of you sales traffic is a pretty stupid thing to do.

No, that's a fair question, the ~40% is organic & ppc (Social Not a Big Help to Ecommerce - eMarketer), sure you also have providers such as Bing & AOL but that is getting in to semantics.

For the suggestions, you can read this Providers. Basically these guys design tech architectures & rapid install sites that can rank sites up with Amazon & eBay without marketing. So the pricinple is choose hosting provider/architecture that suits you needs and includes a cdn service with it, ideally in a cluster. Something like MaxCDN and CloudFlare are in effect Tier 5/6 & Tier 7 (depending on how you look at it) addons - so you have to put in 5-10x more ranking effort. That decreases your visitor per $1 count as your time is money and you have to buy services to counteract lower quality neighbours using the same services.

The corporates use Tier 1/2 tech generally (this is what we have access to) - it means you can generate 25-30 visitors per $1. Then you can go and read this (http://www.warriorforum.com/search-e...ml#post9432398) - they did the same with business seo and you still come to the 25-30 visitors per $1. AWS used to be Tier 1/2 but are dropping as more mass market sites go online - but they are a start however you need a cluster architecture for it (with CloudFront) which you normally have to design yourself - https://twitter.com/SharedMagento/st...28109523398656.

Basically whichever path you take you end up with the same end result - 1-30 visitors per $1 - and Google knows exactly how much traffic to send to you within this range to match your site content, performance, platform, profile. Sure you can burst visitors, but their algorithms will catch up and penalise you unless you revert to the mean.

agreed, I have the same situation, google will manually punish your sites if they are all in one account.

It's easy for your sites to get dinged when you make it easy for Google to track you and your SEO activities by putting all your sites on the same Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools accounts.

That said, sometimes it's inevitable because there are certain pieces of information you can only get through GWT and those hungry for that information would have no choice but to add their sites to their account.

GWT and GA are remarkable and free SEM analysis tools, but are they worth the risk? Any answer given to that question would be purely subjective, so it's up to you to decide.

Sorry, but there are two sides to every story. Your bad experience with them does not mean that they are not to be trusted.

Wow. This thread makes me super nervous. I do use Google Analytics and webmaster tools on my site because I think the information is useful. However, I would like to know how you go about getting ranking on Google if you don't use any of these services? Thanks.

Thanks for the heads up man, guess it's good to have a plan B, will keep Google Analytics and other related webmaster tools far from my sites.

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It`s true, once you play hard with any of your websites added to GWT all your others will be checked by Google very carefully and if they see anything suspicious you can be sure the penalization will comes really fast. There are so many good tools, why people using GWT and giving everything about their projects away for free to them. If you are doing a lot of SEO related things especially if you are logged into your G account they can collect everyting about your activity, joining the dots is a matter of time only (((: People , don`t use GWT, if you have one website 100% white hat - OK, but not for several projects cos it`s asking for trouble.

And what benefit do you get to add sites to WMT?

I think there is no benefits to webmasters, but Google has more control to track your site..

I will say don't use Google Analytic too...

We shouldn't give much information about our site to Google to be safe....

If Google has all the information, why it fails to detect the other sites which were listed in WMT? It explored later when one site is penalized....