Out Of The Google -950 Penalty

How To Get Out Of The Google 950 Penalty

Once upon a time, a young boy created a Sitseeing attraction (site) for fun. The website grew and grew. The young boy was not an siteseeing optimization expert, and the little he knew, he used on his businesses. He ignored the optimization stuff for this fun site because it was working - it was making him happy and making his visitors happy as well. Then a G[oogle]iant tries to mess with his site and all his visitors were scared away. After never making any kind of changes to help enhance the site, he was faced with a dilema. After a few days of worrying about losing MORE than half his visitors (and revenues), he got out his slingshot and began to make changes to his site and get rid of the menace. A few days later the G[oogle]iant left as suddenly as he came. Although only a small percentage of the site was fixed, the problems had seemed to go away. The little boy wishes that the G[oogle]iant never comes back. However, the G[oogle] is still looming out there and has not finished terrorizing everyone.

The little boy found out later that the G[oogle]iant was set upon the land by the King himself to rid the kingdom of Internetia of Spamogres. Unfortunately for the little boy, the G[oogle]iant was unable to determine between the spamogres and the good guys. The little boy really appreciates the King's efforts of getting rid of the vermin, but would have like the King to take less drastic steps to do so, unless he knows it is going to work.

Future scenario #1: The little boy's site continues to get more popular, the land is rid of spamogres, dupers and all of the other evils in the land. The boy makes enough gold to retire and live in a castle of his own.

Future scenario #2: A new Giant comes back to menace the land. This time, the loss of visitors and continous fighting with the Giant made his tasks a lot less fun. He left his siteseeing attaction and never returned again.

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When I began www.popstarsplus.com two years ago, I never envisioned it getting this big. It will reach over 900,000 Unique Users (over 2 million hits) this month. The site began when I was bored working on my eCommerce sites such as www.GiftIdeasPlus.com. That old site is still around, but does not have nearly as many visitors. Pop Stars Plus began as a personal hobby site and I did what I thought was right on the site, not really ever worrying about search engine optimization (SEO). In fact, I remember when another site owner asked me for contacts to trade reciprocal links with other like sites. I told him that besides his, I only traded sites with three or four other places. I have a lot of links going out that I never asked for a reciprocal, but I have received many links coming in from other places that like my content. The fact that I have so many links on my pages is against standard SEO, but I never cared, because having and rating those outgoing links is part of my original content (the rankings and order, not the site). This is why people come, link, and come back.

Anyway . . . when I began PSP, I created the initial templates with the HTML knowledge I had, and with the very, very little SEO knowledge I happened to come across. The pages remained like this until now. There was never any reason to change them, until now. What is interesting, is that I knew very little about SEO, but managed to create a well ranking site. Google supposedly likes that. However, I was being penalized for my SEO ignorance and for the first time, needed to make changes to better optimize my site (through deoptmizing keywords).

Anyway, I am very glad the site is mostly back. My traffic is increasing to normal rates each day. There is only one very peculiar thing. One of the key phrases for a page is not working. My Ashley Tisdale page is still stuck in the 950s. It was one of the pages that has been de-optimized and has since been reindexed by Google, but the page was put into Google detention and has not been released. Some people at Webmaster world have suggested changing the title/description tags to fix the 950 problem - however, I do not see that as a problem. All my other pages are okay (at least the ones I tried).

Until next time . . .

Ian Ripley

-950 Penalty

I've Been Hit With the -950 Penalty by Google.

First they kill me with bad stats at AdSense, now after the smoke clears, it seems that I have been hit with the -950 penalty. That is the reason my traffic is so far down - no one can find my site - www.popstarsplus.com

What really sucks about this is that I have not intentionally done anything to this or my other sites to warrant a penalty. I created a good site that was good for my visitors. Yes, I had begun to make money on my site - however, as I keep on saying, it has been to enhance the visitor's experience. Why not show a copy of the DVD/movie in a filmography. If they want to purchase it, it is their option. I have painstakenly spent hundreds and hundreds of hours going through thousands of web pages to rank and find the best ones for each celebrity. I have spend many hours enhancing the site and adding content such as news stories. Yet, Google, penalizes me.

It would have been nice to get at least a warning since I have not been penalized before. It would be nice for Google to say something about it to myself and all the other webmasters out there that have been affected -- at least tell us why we may have recieved penalties. We know that they are not going to go into specifics, but at least say something like, "we have provided penalties based on over optimization of words/terms" or anything else. Their guidelines are not what you can really call detailed. A general "penalties were given to websites not following our guidelines." Still not great, but at least we will know if it is something that we can do to correct the problem, or if it was an error on their part that they will be fixing.

I have already made a change to navigation bar on my site. It used to show all pages on the same level, now it is just showing all pages under home. No, this is not a benefit to my visitors, but if my pages remain in the 900s, I will not have any visitors. So, after not doing any of the SEO stuff - I have resorted to making changes to boost up page ranking becasue of a penalty from Google that I do not deserve.

I guess making a website that is both good for my customers and good for Google is impossible. That is what is so frustrating about all of this, I think I am doing good, then out of nowhere, without providing any reason, the rug has been taken out from under me.

Reading many of the posts on WebmasterWorld.com, you have to wonder what is going on. Most of these people, like me, are trying to create good websites for our visitors. We have not done anything wrong, yet we have been punished.

If any webmasters who are techs out there are listening. Let's get together and create a search engine that will not only rival, but surpass Google. Google is good, but is not great. In fact, with this recent update, many of the results are not as relevant as they used to be. So, lets make a better search engine that finds relevant information and remembers the little guys, filters out the spammers and gets around the beurocratic red tape of multimillion dollar businesses such as Google.

Not really very harsh words, but now that I have said them, Google can take me for a ride and basically kill all of my other sites as well.

Google: All I am saying is that you are not being very fair. Please communicate and tell us what is going on. If we knew, we would fix it - we just need a little direction.

Until next time?

Ian Ripley

What Is Google Doing To Me?

What the heck is Google doing to me? It seems that every time I take two steps forward with my www.popstarsplus.com site, I am always pushed back a step.

First, my Google Adsense impressions go way down last week, although my traffic & unique users are going up. A few days ago my traffic took a huge hit. By surfing around the web, you can read a number of discussions by webmasters complaining or trying to theorize what is happening. What I have gathered is that Google made an update to its algorithm. This tweaking by Google has made vast changes to websites throughout the Internet. There are many theories out there as to what types of changes were actually being made, but no one is sure and it may not be over yet. Some ideas floating around are the penalizing of sites that: have affiliate links, have too dense keyword populations, have too many internal links, have a navigation with too great of a heirarcy, and/or have duplicated content.

Personally, I think the people at Google have a lot of nerve doing this. My PopStarsPlus.com is mostly original content. Even the pages where I do copy or "license" the biographies from Wikipedia.org, I enhance it so that it provides the user with a better experience than they would have recieved by just going to Wikipedia alone. I "lost" a few high result pages from the SERP (which means Search Engine Results Page). Which is very interesting, since, not to be modest, were some of the best information out there on the web. The content was original (not from Wikipedia) and recently updated. For instance, my Jordan Pruitt page had more information about her than almost anything else you could find and was the #1 result for her name. Now there are a bunch of lyrics sites for her that rank in the top 10. The page fell to #161 in the SERP. For the most part, on the 16th page is almost like not having it listed at all. There are other articles that just mention her name, or just the word "Pruitt" that have nothing to do with her that appear before my page. If I was looking for information on her, my page should be the first in results because it deserves to be there. However, I must say that if you do use her name with either "biography" or "information" after it in a Google search, my site does come up first (which it should).

Let's hope that this chance is temporary. I spend a lot of time on my sites to make sure that they are the best they can be. I try to provide usefull information to my users. Why must I be penalized? Yes, I have a lot of outgoing links. Thpse links are necessary because I rank other websites based on the information about that particular celebrity. It takes at least an hour to go through websites and sometimes more. Yes, I might have a discography of a musician, and list their albums. So what if I add an Amazon link to that album. Google may say that it ads to value. I say BS, this does add value. First of all, it provides the user with a picture of that album (which was actually my original intention of putting these links on my site) and if a visitor wants to purchase the particular album, I have it listed in a chronological order with the artist's other albums, and I also list the tracks. This, from my own purchasing experience, is very helpful. Even when you try to purchase an album on Amazon itself and seach by date, it is not usually consistent - for example, if a CD of a 1977 album was published in 2002, it would be listed as 2002 in the chronology search results. So Google, if you are listening, there is value added by having affiliate links.

I am just so frustrated right now. All of the work done, and no one will see it. I will admit, the higher traffic meant higher revenues and it was nice to bring in some extra money. If none of my pages will be seen, maybe it is not even worth it for me to continue to update the site so frequently. I'll still do it for fun, but if I put down that celebrity X flashed went into rehab for a third time six months after the fact - what's the difference, since no one will read it anyway.

Until next time . . .

Ian Ripley

Why Are My Google Adsense Page Impressions Getting Lower

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Over 1000 pages Indexed

In the never ending saga of getting my pages for www.biographyplus.com indexed on Google, I can happily say that over 1000 links have been added. 1014 to be exact (Although, a few more pages still need to be added).

As to reciprocal linking, I have added links to one of two sites on BiographyPlus, but then had computer issues and vacation and have not added the links to the second site. In the mean time, I still have not emailed them back to say that the links have been added. So what I have learned so far is that you do not need all of these link backs to added to the index.

My next task is to increase the amount of traffic to the site so I can begin to make some money. Yes, this is a web site I want to make money with. If you want to go to one of my sites that I maintain for public information then you can visit my www.IHaveDiabetes.net site. If you have diabetes or know someone who has it, it might be of some benefit to you.

Right now the pages have not been rated by Google, so I will track to see how the reciprocal links improve (or not improve) the page rank. Hopefully Google will give out new page ranks soon so that the test would be of more value. However, I could still monitor those few pages that had already been given PR values.

We shall see.

Until next time . . . .

Ian Ripley