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