Sunday, July 06, 2008

The Google Thing

Posted by Shelly at 7/06/2008 10:20:00 PM

Many, many, many poker bloggers are finding that they've been dogged by Google, with a drop in page rank and a disappearance from search results. If you search Google for hella holdem right now, you'll see that I too have fallen off the map.

It appears to be related to buying/selling links / banner ads / affiliate programs. On the page to request reconsideration by Google, they note:

In general, sites that directly profit from traffic (e.g. search engine optimizers, affiliate programs, etc.) may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reconsidered.


I'm not sure if it will do any good, but you can request reconsideration from Google.

 

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3 Comments:

  1. Human Head said...
    Sunday, July 06, 2008 11:20:00 PM  
    Thanks for the info Shelly. Perhaps you can elaborate on what an example of "good faith" might be and how one might provide such evidence.

    Ridiculous.
    BadBlood said...
    Monday, July 07, 2008 7:49:00 AM  
    Echoing the thanks. I went through the process this morning so hopefully I'll get reconsidered. If not, kind of a bummer.
    Shelly said...
    Monday, July 07, 2008 3:57:00 PM  
    It seems to me that if actual humans evaluated web sites for Google instead of programmed bots, the "good faith" thing would be readily apparent - as every single one of us in our little circle of the world puts out unique content on a regular basis on our blogs. Is that not "good faith"? That's what I take it to mean, anyway. Our blogs are much more than affiliate program adverts. A human being can see that, but Google obviously doesn't employ humans for the "first pass" and my guess is that reconsideration is done by a human being - but by the time said "reconsideration" occurs, the damage may already be done. Google states clearly that it can take "some time" for reconsideration to occur (I've read that it is usually a matter of months), and by then, the advertisers could very well dry up based on the decreased traffic and PageRank.

    This of course doesn't take into account the fact that "good faith" is a purely subjective term, and I see no way that Google could possibly apply such a policy of "good faith" equally across the board.

    Yeah, it is pretty ridiculous. Unfair at best.

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