-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