I have spent months creating a great custom t shirt company online.
Last week i found that site had been put in a minus 50 group. After
reviewing many links i found a few bad links that i have no idea how
they were ever created. The only conclusion i can come to is a
competitor has submitted my site to know bad links. What can i do to
clean up the bad links? I have send emails and tried to contact them
via there domain registration but they are identity protected. The
bad links that i found are
directorybin.com/index.php?s=A&q=company
www.yvir.com/index.php?q=IRT circlejourney.journalspace.com/?m=3&y=2008
Over the past 2 months we have been featured on G4TV and Download.com
for our t shirt designer. We have received a lot of buzz from blogs
due to the fact any can make money by placing our custom t shirt
designer on there site and sell shirts and make a commission.
I realize this is a strong conclustion but i have no other idea as to
how my site was listed on these drectories and i do not recognize the
tet that was submittied.
Any help as to why my site is in a minus 50 and how can i get back to
good standing ASAP would be much appreciated
> I have spent months creating a great custom t shirt company online.
> Last week i found that site had been put in a minus 50 group. After
> reviewing many links i found a few bad links that i have no idea how
> they were ever created. The only conclusion i can come to is a
> competitor has submitted my site to know bad links. What can i do to
> clean up the bad links? I have send emails and tried to contact them
> via there domain registration but they are identity protected. The
> bad links that i found are
> directorybin.com/index.php?s=A&q=companywww.yvir.com/index.php?q=IRT > circlejourney.journalspace.com/?m=3&y=2008
> Over the past 2 months we have been featured on G4TV and Download.com
> for our t shirt designer. We have received a lot of buzz from blogs
> due to the fact any can make money by placing our custom t shirt
> designer on there site and sell shirts and make a commission.
> I realize this is a strong conclustion but i have no other idea as to
> how my site was listed on these drectories and i do not recognize the
> tet that was submittied.
> Any help as to why my site is in a minus 50 and how can i get back to
> good standing ASAP would be much appreciated
> I have spent months creating a great custom t shirt company online.
> Last week i found that site had been put in a minus 50 group. After
> reviewing many links i found a few bad links that i have no idea how
> they were ever created. The only conclusion i can come to is a
> competitor has submitted my site to know bad links. What can i do to
> clean up the bad links? I have send emails and tried to contact them
> via there domain registration but they are identity protected. The
> bad links that i found are
> directorybin.com/index.php?s=A&q=companywww.yvir.com/index.php?q=IRT > circlejourney.journalspace.com/?m=3&y=2008
> Over the past 2 months we have been featured on G4TV and Download.com
> for our t shirt designer. We have received a lot of buzz from blogs
> due to the fact any can make money by placing our custom t shirt
> designer on there site and sell shirts and make a commission.
> I realize this is a strong conclustion but i have no other idea as to
> how my site was listed on these drectories and i do not recognize the
> tet that was submittied.
> Any help as to why my site is in a minus 50 and how can i get back to
> good standing ASAP would be much appreciated
BBdeath is right - your site won't be penalised for having inbound
links from bad neighbourhoods - it is only if you are returning links
to bad neighbourhoods that would make Google think you are
participating in some kind of link farm.
Your site looks nice but I think you should have a bit of a look at
your homepage title --> Custom T Shirts - Shirts -Create your own T
Shirts - T Shirts- Embroidery
Four uses of the word shirts looks a bit like keyword stuffing and
given that this is the link people will see in SERPs, it doesn't read
particularly well. My rule of thumb for a good title is to have it
less than 70 chatacters (including spaces) that contains relevant
keywords, reads well for humans and ideally contains a compelling
reason for somebody to click the link.
Your meta description is quite good (Custom t-shirts made online in
minutes. Personalize your apparel with our easy to use t shirt
designer. Make t shirts with your own photos or use our ...) in that
it explain that you can design t-shirts online but you will see from
the above, the call to action is truncated in SERPs.
You might like to think about 'economy' of words in your description
to see if you can get your call to action included in full.
As you go deeper into the site, your titles get a bit long and look
even more like keyword stuffing --> Ladies Short Sleeve District
Tee .::. T shirts .::. Teen Apparel :: Custom T Shirts - Shirts -
Create your own T Shirts - T Shirts- Embroidery --> again - remember,
it is ideal to have either the entire title less than 70 characters,
or if this is not possible, ensure that the first 65 characters
contain a compelling reason for a human to click the link.
Good luck with it all and well done with the site.
So you do not think these bad links that i found are the problem as to
why i have a minus 50 on the site. I was in the top 3 for custom t
shirts and now an ranked 50-60th.
> BBdeath is right - your site won't be penalised for having inbound
> links from bad neighbourhoods - it is only if you are returning links
> to bad neighbourhoods that would make Google think you are
> participating in some kind of link farm.
> Your site looks nice but I think you should have a bit of a look at
> your homepage title --> Custom T Shirts - Shirts -Create your own T
> Shirts - T Shirts- Embroidery
> Four uses of the word shirts looks a bit like keyword stuffing and
> given that this is the link people will see in SERPs, it doesn't read
> particularly well. My rule of thumb for a good title is to have it
> less than 70 chatacters (including spaces) that contains relevant
> keywords, reads well for humans and ideally contains a compelling
> reason for somebody to click the link.
> Your meta description is quite good (Custom t-shirts made online in
> minutes. Personalize your apparel with our easy to use t shirt
> designer. Make t shirts with your own photos or use our ...) in that
> it explain that you can design t-shirts online but you will see from
> the above, the call to action is truncated in SERPs.
> You might like to think about 'economy' of words in your description
> to see if you can get your call to action included in full.
> As you go deeper into the site, your titles get a bit long and look
> even more like keyword stuffing --> Ladies Short Sleeve District
> Tee .::. T shirts .::. Teen Apparel :: Custom T Shirts - Shirts -
> Create your own T Shirts - T Shirts- Embroidery --> again - remember,
> it is ideal to have either the entire title less than 70 characters,
> or if this is not possible, ensure that the first 65 characters
> contain a compelling reason for a human to click the link.
> Good luck with it all and well done with the site.
> What search term is "minus 50" that was caused by these links?
> On Aug 25, 8:27 pm, Sonicshack wrote:
> > I have spent months creating a great custom t shirt company online.
> > Last week i found that site had been put in a minus 50 group. After
> > reviewing many links i found a few bad links that i have no idea how
> > they were ever created. The only conclusion i can come to is a
> > competitor has submitted my site to know bad links. What can i do to
> > clean up the bad links? I have send emails and tried to contact them
> > via there domain registration but they are identity protected. The
> > bad links that i found are
> > directorybin.com/index.php?s=A&q=companywww.yvir.com/index.php?q=IRT > > circlejourney.journalspace.com/?m=3&y=2008
> > Over the past 2 months we have been featured on G4TV and Download.com
> > for our t shirt designer. We have received a lot of buzz from blogs
> > due to the fact any can make money by placing our custom t shirt
> > designer on there site and sell shirts and make a commission.
> > I realize this is a strong conclustion but i have no other idea as to
> > how my site was listed on these drectories and i do not recognize the
> > tet that was submittied.
> > Any help as to why my site is in a minus 50 and how can i get back to
> > good standing ASAP would be much appreciated
Your site does not have a robots.txt file. However there are links to
login, my account, view cart and others that are no business of
robots' (yet they have been indexed), and so they should be disallowed
in a robots.txt file with at least this in it:
There is also a canonical domain issue - www and non-www urls both
respond with a 200. You shoudl pick one form and 310 redirect the
other to it in the .htaccess file. Also redirect index.php to root:
Options +Indexes +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
> What search term is "minus 50" that was caused by these links?
> On Aug 25, 8:27 pm, Sonicshack wrote:
> > I have spent months creating a great custom t shirt company online.
> > Last week i found that site had been put in a minus 50 group. After
> > reviewing many links i found a few bad links that i have no idea how
> > they were ever created. The only conclusion i can come to is a
> > competitor has submitted my site to know bad links. What can i do to
> > clean up the bad links? I have send emails and tried to contact them
> > via there domain registration but they are identity protected. The
> > bad links that i found are
> > directorybin.com/index.php?s=A&q=companywww.yvir.com/index.php?q=IRT > > circlejourney.journalspace.com/?m=3&y=2008
> > Over the past 2 months we have been featured on G4TV and Download.com
> > for our t shirt designer. We have received a lot of buzz from blogs
> > due to the fact any can make money by placing our custom t shirt
> > designer on there site and sell shirts and make a commission.
> > I realize this is a strong conclustion but i have no other idea as to
> > how my site was listed on these drectories and i do not recognize the
> > tet that was submittied.
> > Any help as to why my site is in a minus 50 and how can i get back to
> > good standing ASAP would be much appreciated
I have to disagree with the above comments, you can be penalised for
your incoming links, you should not be penalised for what your
competitors do, but if Google thinks you are building links
unnaturally then they can dish out a -xx penalty. There are dozens of
examples throughout this group, and something I have suffered from
myself.
I only scanned the links quickly but most of them are from blogs, most
of them are not in the same niche with some of them looking like blogs
solely designed for link building. Look at http://gishifinance.com/ it
has articles for:
Online car insurance quotes
Important medical information for women
Daily excercise suggestions
Small Business Web Hosting
Win 10K at Sonicshack.com
How to stop cats from scratching furnitures?
Retire Early and Live on Your Investments
Is chocolate lethal for dogs?
Also because a lot of the anchor texts of the links are the same /
similar it does not look like they are from natural linking patterns.
You also said you have spent several months creating the company, how
long has the site been live? You have 7,499 links pointing to your
domain according to yahoo, if the site has only been up for a few
months then it is likely that gaining that many links that fast would
appear unnatural.
I would do my best to have most of these links removed, try and gain
some decent high quality links. Submit a reconsideration request and
pray that it wont take too long. Unfortunately from my experience
cleaning up your back link profile is not so easy so a quick
resolution to the problem is not very likely.
If it would be 1% more effective/easier/cheaper to gain rankings by
bowling your competitors out than doing your own job well everybody
would start it and SERPs would be ruined in days.
> I have to disagree with the above comments, you can be penalised for
> your incoming links, you should not be penalised for what your
> competitors do, but if Google thinks you are building links
> unnaturally then they can dish out a -xx penalty. There are dozens of
> examples throughout this group, and something I have suffered from
> myself.
> I only scanned the links quickly but most of them are from blogs, most
> of them are not in the same niche with some of them looking like blogs
> solely designed for link building. Look athttp://gishifinance.com/it > has articles for:
> Online car insurance quotes
> Important medical information for women
> Daily excercise suggestions
> Small Business Web Hosting
> Win 10K at Sonicshack.com
> How to stop cats from scratching furnitures?
> Retire Early and Live on Your Investments
> Is chocolate lethal for dogs?
> Also because a lot of the anchor texts of the links are the same /
> similar it does not look like they are from natural linking patterns.
> You also said you have spent several months creating the company, how
> long has the site been live? You have 7,499 links pointing to your
> domain according to yahoo, if the site has only been up for a few
> months then it is likely that gaining that many links that fast would
> appear unnatural.
> I would do my best to have most of these links removed, try and gain
> some decent high quality links. Submit a reconsideration request and
> pray that it wont take too long. Unfortunately from my experience
> cleaning up your back link profile is not so easy so a quick
> resolution to the problem is not very likely.
I would like to think that most of these types of penalties would
applied manually as I can't see a computer differentiating between a
person building links to improve their rankings or a person building
links to kill a competitors rankings.
I personally refused to believe a site could be penalised for its
incoming links for months until it happened to me. I always thought
that most of these sites had something else that would cause the
penalty
It is also worth noting that for every 1 site that gets penalised for
questionable link building there are probably 100+ more doing exactly
the same thing and not getting penalised.
> If it would be 1% more effective/easier/cheaper to gain rankings by
> bowling your competitors out than doing your own job well everybody
> would start it and SERPs would be ruined in days.
> On Aug 26, 10:25 am, Yossarian wrote:
> > I have to disagree with the above comments, you can be penalised for
> > your incoming links, you should not be penalised for what your
> > competitors do, but if Google thinks you are building links
> > unnaturally then they can dish out a -xx penalty. There are dozens of
> > examples throughout this group, and something I have suffered from
> > myself.
> > I only scanned the links quickly but most of them are from blogs, most
> > of them are not in the same niche with some of them looking like blogs
> > solely designed for link building. Look athttp://gishifinance.com/it > > has articles for:
> > Online car insurance quotes
> > Important medical information for women
> > Daily excercise suggestions
> > Small Business Web Hosting
> > Win 10K at Sonicshack.com
> > How to stop cats from scratching furnitures?
> > Retire Early and Live on Your Investments
> > Is chocolate lethal for dogs?
> > Also because a lot of the anchor texts of the links are the same /
> > similar it does not look like they are from natural linking patterns.
> > You also said you have spent several months creating the company, how
> > long has the site been live? You have 7,499 links pointing to your
> > domain according to yahoo, if the site has only been up for a few
> > months then it is likely that gaining that many links that fast would
> > appear unnatural.
> > I would do my best to have most of these links removed, try and gain
> > some decent high quality links. Submit a reconsideration request and
> > pray that it wont take too long. Unfortunately from my experience
> > cleaning up your back link profile is not so easy so a quick
> > resolution to the problem is not very likely.
Go Compare is first for it's name and in top10 for most insurance
comaprison related terms. And otherwise having 2300 IBL for the main
page and ~6000 for the whole domain does not look too spammy in their
case.
So I'm still quite sure that Google Bowling does not exist in this
way.
Regarding to the original site: what Volvox777 mentioned- your title
is simply spammy for t shirt- mainly as nearly all of your page-titles
contains the same what you use for home page title. This is definitely
a disadvantage.
And with releasing the plugin you are creating your own competition-
regarding to content/service.
> I would like to think that most of these types of penalties would
> applied manually as I can't see a computer differentiating between a
> person building links to improve their rankings or a person building
> links to kill a competitors rankings.
> I personally refused to believe a site could be penalised for its
> incoming links for months until it happened to me. I always thought
> that most of these sites had something else that would cause the
> penalty
> It is also worth noting that for every 1 site that gets penalised for
> questionable link building there are probably 100+ more doing exactly
> the same thing and not getting penalised.
> On Aug 26, 3:28 pm, BBdeath wrote:
> > If it would be 1% more effective/easier/cheaper to gain rankings by
> > bowling your competitors out than doing your own job well everybody
> > would start it and SERPs would be ruined in days.
> > On Aug 26, 10:25 am, Yossarian wrote:
> > > I have to disagree with the above comments, you can be penalised for
> > > your incoming links, you should not be penalised for what your
> > > competitors do, but if Google thinks you are building links
> > > unnaturally then they can dish out a -xx penalty. There are dozens of
> > > examples throughout this group, and something I have suffered from
> > > myself.
> > > I only scanned the links quickly but most of them are from blogs, most
> > > of them are not in the same niche with some of them looking like blogs
> > > solely designed for link building. Look athttp://gishifinance.com/it > > > has articles for:
> > > Online car insurance quotes
> > > Important medical information for women
> > > Daily excercise suggestions
> > > Small Business Web Hosting
> > > Win 10K at Sonicshack.com
> > > How to stop cats from scratching furnitures?
> > > Retire Early and Live on Your Investments
> > > Is chocolate lethal for dogs?
> > > Also because a lot of the anchor texts of the links are the same /
> > > similar it does not look like they are from natural linking patterns.
> > > You also said you have spent several months creating the company, how
> > > long has the site been live? You have 7,499 links pointing to your
> > > domain according to yahoo, if the site has only been up for a few
> > > months then it is likely that gaining that many links that fast would
> > > appear unnatural.
> > > I would do my best to have most of these links removed, try and gain
> > > some decent high quality links. Submit a reconsideration request and
> > > pray that it wont take too long. Unfortunately from my experience
> > > cleaning up your back link profile is not so easy so a quick
> > > resolution to the problem is not very likely.
Sorry maybe I should of made that more clear, they were penalised back
in January for 3 months, they did not even rank for their name. The
main reason was for questionable link building. Once they cleaned up
their links they had the penalty lifted.
I think the important thing here is Google Bowling is where a
competitor would get you penalised which in theory should never
happen, however building your own links in a questionable way is
something you can be penalised for. I assume (hope) it takes a human
review to differentiate between the 2.
> Go Compare is first for it's name and in top10 for most insurance
> comaprison related terms. And otherwise having 2300 IBL for the main
> page and ~6000 for the whole domain does not look too spammy in their
> case.
> So I'm still quite sure that Google Bowling does not exist in this
> way.
> Regarding to the original site: what Volvox777 mentioned- your title
> is simply spammy for t shirt- mainly as nearly all of your page-titles
> contains the same what you use for home page title. This is definitely
> a disadvantage.
> And with releasing the plugin you are creating your own competition-
> regarding to content/service.
> > I would like to think that most of these types of penalties would
> > applied manually as I can't see a computer differentiating between a
> > person building links to improve their rankings or a person building
> > links to kill a competitors rankings.
> > I personally refused to believe a site could be penalised for its
> > incoming links for months until it happened to me. I always thought
> > that most of these sites had something else that would cause the
> > penalty
> > It is also worth noting that for every 1 site that gets penalised for
> > questionable link building there are probably 100+ more doing exactly
> > the same thing and not getting penalised.
> > On Aug 26, 3:28 pm, BBdeath wrote:
> > > If it would be 1% more effective/easier/cheaper to gain rankings by
> > > bowling your competitors out than doing your own job well everybody
> > > would start it and SERPs would be ruined in days.
> > > On Aug 26, 10:25 am, Yossarian wrote:
> > > > I have to disagree with the above comments, you can be penalised for
> > > > your incoming links, you should not be penalised for what your
> > > > competitors do, but if Google thinks you are building links
> > > > unnaturally then they can dish out a -xx penalty. There are dozens of
> > > > examples throughout this group, and something I have suffered from
> > > > myself.
> > > > I only scanned the links quickly but most of them are from blogs, most
> > > > of them are not in the same niche with some of them looking like blogs
> > > > solely designed for link building. Look athttp://gishifinance.com/it > > > > has articles for:
> > > > Online car insurance quotes
> > > > Important medical information for women
> > > > Daily excercise suggestions
> > > > Small Business Web Hosting
> > > > Win 10K at Sonicshack.com
> > > > How to stop cats from scratching furnitures?
> > > > Retire Early and Live on Your Investments
> > > > Is chocolate lethal for dogs?
> > > > Also because a lot of the anchor texts of the links are the same /
> > > > similar it does not look like they are from natural linking patterns.
> > > > You also said you have spent several months creating the company, how
> > > > long has the site been live? You have 7,499 links pointing to your
> > > > domain according to yahoo, if the site has only been up for a few
> > > > months then it is likely that gaining that many links that fast would
> > > > appear unnatural.
> > > > I would do my best to have most of these links removed, try and gain
> > > > some decent high quality links. Submit a reconsideration request and
> > > > pray that it wont take too long. Unfortunately from my experience
> > > > cleaning up your back link profile is not so easy so a quick
> > > > resolution to the problem is not very likely.
"Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling
links onto a competitor's site to reduce its search rank isn't
impossible, but it's extremely difficult. "We try to be mindful of
when a technique can be abused and make our algorithm robust against
it," he says. "I won't go out on a limb and say it's impossible. But
Google bowling is much more inviting as an idea than it is in
practice."
Cutts also points out that any potential for sabotage exists across
all search engines. "It really should be called 'search engine
bowling,' " he says."
I have no doubt it is hard to deliberately get someone penalised but
it is still in theory possible, and in the case of the above site it
does not appear to be something someone else has done but something
they have done to improve their rankings.
I don't think 2 webmasters have ever suggested it either
The only effect is that of an initial deceptive unnatural PR boost,
followed by a corresponding PR drop once the spammy incoming links get
discounted as they would in time, especially now that Google has
improved detection and recognition of unnatural linking patterns.
When webmasters don't realize their sites got an artificial boost in
that way they rejoice in their good fortune and don't question why it
happened. But of course as soon as they see the inevitable drop then
they worry and they consider that a penalty. It's not. It's removal of
an artificial boost.
> "Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling
> links onto a competitor's site to reduce its search rank isn't
> impossible, but it's extremely difficult. "We try to be mindful of
> when a technique can be abused and make our algorithm robust against
> it," he says. "I won't go out on a limb and say it's impossible. But
> Google bowling is much more inviting as an idea than it is in
> practice."
> Cutts also points out that any potential for sabotage exists across
> all search engines. "It really should be called 'search engine
> bowling,' " he says."
> I have no doubt it is hard to deliberately get someone penalised but
> it is still in theory possible, and in the case of the above site it
> does not appear to be something someone else has done but something
> they have done to improve their rankings.
> I don't think 2 webmasters have ever suggested it either
That page is over a year old. And the "quote" from Matt Cutts is
undated, so it may come from much earlier. It may even be out of
context - I cannot see it in any current Google blogs, etc.
Aw, c'mon! 2005?!!? That's around 1,200 algorithm changes ago.
I'm referring to TODAY - end of Augiust, 2008. Neither here nor
anywhere else relevant are there any mass complaints about "Google
bowling". Whether or not it ever worked, it certainly doesn't now.
And even if your citations were all current, they're still so
statistically insignificant they don't even qualify as noise.
Fiction. Urban myth. Not happening anywhere I can see.
It might be that the links to your site are not counting the way they
might have in the past. In general, it is important to us that links
are not just exchanged, bought/sold or otherwise used in an attempt to
manipulate rankings, as we have detailed in our help center article at
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356
If you find that your site has issues with regards to our Webmaster
Guidelines that can be resolved, I would recommend doing that and then
submitting a reconsideration request, detailing the changes that you
have made.
"At that point, I decided to poll our readers and see if they feel
that most of the "minus" X related threads and penalties are back link
related or something else. Most believe the penalties are related to
one's back links.
Here is the break down:
* 47% said Yes (50 responses)
* 28% said No Idea (30 responses)
* 25% said No (26 responses)
"
I realise a poll of 106 people is not exactly scientifically sound.
@JohnMu
Your message would imply that you cant get a penalty from incoming
links rather the bad links would be discounted, however a lot of SEO
blogs (not just my outdated links in my previous posts) seem to think
that incoming links can trigger a penalty. I don't suppose you fancy
confirming or denying this?
Looking at sonicshack.com I would personally say the backlinks seem to
be the most questionable area and I don't really think discounting
these would have them ranking on page 5 for sonicshack would it? After
all they do have a few decent ones that should at least keep them
ranking for their own name.
The titles are a little spammy and dupe meta descriptions wont help
but I have seen a lot worse not be penalised.
Don't get me wrong if I knew for definite that incoming links can not
hurt you I would be over the moon, not because I am going to go out
and linkspam but over the past few months I have been becoming more
and more paranoid about the back links to my sites.
In my last job (yes JohnMu, no longer with APN), I had a fair bit of
contact with Google staff to seek guidance on a variety of issues.
These guys never give direct answers to questions as this would not be
fair to other sites, but they did give (emphasis on the inverted
commas) "recommended reading". The trick to understanding what they
were saying came from reading between then lines so to speak.
If I were using this Rosetta Stone method to decode JohnMu's comment
"If you find that your site has issues with regards to our Webmaster
Guidelines..." I would probably interpret this as meaning I should
take a very good look at the site to see if any of the guidelines have
been breached.
As to Yossarian's comment that Google might manually apply a penalty
to random sites, this is nonsense - not only would this require way to
much human time to do, it goes against Google's basic philosphy that
they want their algo to be able to spot things - the best example of
this is the famous 'total failure' Google bomb that had a link to the
White House site of George Bush as the #1 result - Google had an
AdWords link explaining this and explaining the reason they had not
manually removed the link was because they feel it is more important
to update their algo to be able to detect this sort of thing.
As by way of explanation for your current trouble, I would be inclined
to think that others have got the answer spot on - your site was
ranking artificially high due to the links that Google has since
devalued.
On link building and linking out - I have a simple approach to this -
with both inbound and outbound links...simply ask yourself...would
visitors to my site/to that site...find the content on my site/the
other site useful - if you can honestly answer yes - then seek or
provide a link.
Volvox777 - if you think the links to sonicshack have been devalued
then why would they not be ranking or ranking much lower for their
site name "sonicshack"?
> In my last job (yes JohnMu, no longer with APN), I had a fair bit of
> contact with Google staff to seek guidance on a variety of issues.
> These guys never give direct answers to questions as this would not be
> fair to other sites, but they did give (emphasis on the inverted
> commas) "recommended reading". The trick to understanding what they
> were saying came from reading between then lines so to speak.
> If I were using this Rosetta Stone method to decode JohnMu's comment
> "If you find that yoursitehas issues with regards to our Webmaster
> Guidelines..." I would probably interpret this as meaning I should
> take a very good look at thesiteto see if any of the guidelines have
> been breached.
> As to Yossarian's comment that Google might manually apply apenalty
> to random sites, this is nonsense - not only would this require way to
> much human time to do, it goes against Google's basic philosphy that
> they want their algo to be able to spot things - the best example of
> this is the famous 'total failure' Google bomb that had a link to the
> White Housesiteof George Bush as the #1 result - Google had an
> AdWords link explaining this and explaining the reason they had not
> manually removed the link was because they feel it is more important
> to update their algo to be able to detect this sort of thing.
> As by way of explanation for your current trouble, I would be inclined
> to think that others have got the answer spot on - yoursitewas
> ranking artificially high due to the links that Google has since
> devalued.
> On link building and linking out - I have a simple approach to this -
> with both inbound and outbound links...simply ask yourself...would
> visitors to mysite/to thatsite...find the content on mysite/the
> othersiteuseful - if you can honestly answer yes - then seek or
> provide a link.
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