Well it was bound to happen at some point I guess. So many people I know have been hit by the Google ban, resulting in a loss of thousands of rankings and keywords. It finally hit me… either this morning or late last night. My two biggest sites which brought in a bit over 10,000 uniques/day combined were murdered by Google. My big time Keywords that I used to rank #1 or #2 for, are now nowhere to be found in the first 30 pages. I quit looking after reaching page 30. Everything I’ve spent the last year or more working towards went down the toilet just like that.

What did I do wrong?

  • I lived by the Google. You can’t rely solely on Google for traffic. You just can’t.
  • I sold text links. Matt Cutts of Google has said time and time again that you can’t sell text links on your site. I ignored those messages and did it anyways, namely using a bad company called Text Link Ads. I think this is the biggest reason why my sites were penalized. I’ve read so many stories on DigitalPoint of people running TLA and getting banned. Once again I was blinded by the green dollar instead of provided quality links for my visitors.
  • I linked to bad sites. Using the Bad Neighborhood Tool, I discovered that I had several links on my sites that were not friendly. If you link to sketchy sites, you will get penalized.

What will I do now?

Other then close up shop and quit the internet business (which I will seriously contemplate if I don’t see improvements by January 2008), there isn’t much to do then just wait. I do recommend reading David Airey’s post on How to reverse the Google penalty. I will take the following actions to help my case.

  • Remove TLA from all my websites. I’ve actually done this already. While it just cost me $150/mo, it was something that needed to be done. And what sucks is TLA won’t pay you for the 3 weeks I’ve already ran their ads. Only if you do it the whole month.
  • Add rel=”nofollow” to bad links. I’m going to go through all my links and anything that comes up as bad, I will add rel=”nofollow” tags to them.
  • Remove the word ’sponsor links’ or ‘featured links’ from my sites. I will then just put those links in my blogrolls or link lists.
  • Optimize my websites for Yahoo and MSN, so I do not completely rely on only Google for traffic.
  • Never sell text links again, unless you use rel=”nofollow”.
  • Don’t ever ask people to link to me. Let them come natural.
  • File a reinclusion request in Google Webmaster Tools. Once I have completed all the steps above, I will request to be reinstated. I’ll admit what I did wrong, and include the steps I took to correct my situation.

Getting penalized by Google will cost me thousands of dollars. I was so close to reaching that point where I could quit my job and work online only. The penalizing came at a good time though. I’m glad it hit me now then say 2 weeks after I quit my job. Then I’d really be screwed.

I’m going to do things the right way now, even if it takes a lot longer to achieve results.