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Google's contributions to making the web safer, faster, and generally more awesome cannot go upraised. But as a small business owner under a rather crushing Go

Google's contributions to making the web safer, faster, and generally more awesome cannot go upraised. But as a small business owner under a rather crushing Google link penalty since 2011 I thought I offer my perspective. First, it's important to note my penalty was absolutely not of my creation — I never bought, sold or traded links, and followed Google Web Master guidelines to the letter. Unfortunately loads of spammy links I never created came home to roost in 2011 and I've been penalized ever since. I've done my best to clean up but so far no relief has come. So that out of the way my points: 1. People are certainly free to choose a different search engine and yes, plenty of alternatives exist. The problem is we don't appear to be using them anymore. Although I'm just one example, last month's traffic numbers are quite telling: 328 hits from Google, 2 from Yahoo, and 1 immediate bounce from Bing. Of the 328 Google hits, only 10 were for keyword searches. The rest we all for direct variants of my company name (rack forms, rack forms, and rack form). The kicker: On Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo I'm page two or higher for keyword searches, on Google page 15 or lower. Please let that sink in for a moment: despite being buried 15 pages deep in Google, I still got more keyword hits from them than I did from being a top result in three other search engines combined! It was not like this just a few years years ago and it's frankly quite concerning. Here's the rub: If you're a Google user, which over 98% of my potential users appear to be, because of my penalty you'll simply never know I exist, and if you're in the market for kick ass web form software that kinda stinks for you. I have a fantastic product! Despite this living hell of a penalty I still believe in Google, and absolutely believe they mean well. I just really, really hope they can figure out a way to prevent spam without getting guys like me caught up in the middle of the fray. For my business Google's market share is no longer academic, it's a tough reality that's becoming very difficult to ignore.

vdaniuk 12y ago
Look, you should dance with Google, not fight it. If your domain(sic!) was pessimized, you just upgrade your site, rewrite content, add more data and images and create a new domain. Then you concentrate on promoting your new website.
seanflyon 12y ago
> Unfortunately loads of spammy links I never created came home to roost Does this mean that users were posting spammy links on your site, that spammy links elsewhere pointed to your site or something else?
- rackforms 12y ago
  Option 2: spammy links elsewhere pointed to my site. And I do mean spammy, as in pure spam. Almost all came from foreign language sites, and would be in the form of mysite.com as the link and Louis Vuitton|Fancy Watch Brand|Viagra|Etc as the display text. At no point was my site ever compromised. The kicker is it's unknown if these links were actually helping my site at some point, and the penalty was simply a reflection of the links being devalued. @vdaniuk - Totally with ya, but I've actually done that already. In fact, a 301 actually transferred the penalty from the old site to new back in 2012! I'm literally the worst SEO ever, but in my defense I used a 301 to create a smooth transition for my existing users (which number in the thousands). I had no idea that a 301 would be used against me like that. I guess from my point of view then, the objections to changing brand/identity are: a. My brand is something I work hard on, and changing it is confusing for my users, and difficult and time-consuming from a business standpoint (SSL, taxes, etc). What's more... b. My deepest apologies if I'm wrong on this, but I've heard that even if I do change brands, Google has actually made it clear they may follow webmasters who've been penalized, not just the domains they ran. Now it potentially becomes this bizarre cloak and dagger world of hiding from Google, something I'm simply not comfortable with. I'm proud of my past. c. There's been, and I hate that I know this stuff but I do follow the topic closely now, but I've heard that new web site remain in something called the sandbox for much longer now. God I hate that I even said that as I deplore SEO stuff, but starting a new site simply is no guarantee that rank will be restored. Not to mention the aforementioned costs of setting up a storefront, building the site, possibly being targeted for a new penalty for who I am, and so on. But yes, at some point it may very well come down to starting a new site...again.
blauwbilgorgel 12y ago
Did Google notify you of a link-based penalty? You should set up Google Webmaster Tools, if you haven't already. Then you can read notifications about suspicious links pointing to your site and disavow the ones that are spammy. I am not so sure that you are under a link-based penalty. I know you did not ask for this, but I had a look at your website's link profile, source and index health. 1. SEO: The online web form market is hugely saturated. You probably can not compete with Wufoo on terms like "web form builder". Honestly ask yourself if you currently deserve a top 10 spot for this term. Are you a top 10 player in this field? Explore more specific and longtail keywords. Create better targeted pages and page titles. "Documentation - NicSoft Software" is a missed chance. Create more content on the blog (inbound marketing). 2. Links. You do not have enough natural links to beat competitors. They get linked from webdeveloper forums by real users of the software. You also should check out Google's stance on "Powered by"-links. If this turns in the majority of your backlinking profile, you get links from a lot of bad neighborhoods. These links may thus do more harm than good. It is not an editorial link, but probably in exchange for a free version of the product. Much safer to nofollow links created for profit or SEO/online marketing purposes. 3. Site HTML is not well-structured for information retrieval. For every page on your site, the first heading is "Home". Browse your site with styles disabled. Reorder repeating boilerplate code below the relevant page content. Specify a canonical or make sure only one version is served to visitors with redirects (both www- and non-www versions of the site return duplicate content). 4. Index health is poor. Robots.txt file is indexed. There are a few inactive subdomains, an unattended Wordpress and Drupal install in a subdirectory. Includes are indexed as separate pages "/inc/footer.php". Documentation (the content "meat" if the site) is off limits for bots. Over 90% of pages on the site are in the secondary index, which is not a good sign. About 10 hits a day from Google is far too low for any commercial site to survive on. You could get more than 10 hits on a random wordlist. Do not solely think about in-links. Are you even linking to reputable sources yourself? End-node sites are far less interesting for visitors than hub sites.
- rackforms 12y ago
  Didn't ask for it? If I've learned one thing from this whole affair it's how understanding and kind complete strangers can be. Your feedback is hugely appropriated. That said, a few thoughts: 1. The link based penalty stems from the fact the traffic drops correlate exactly with Penguin release dates. Also, the "official" volunteers and other good folks over at the Google Webmaster forms came to the same conclusion. Before those exact dates I had ranked on page 1 for "php web form software", and page 1 or 2 for "web form software", since mid-2008. To that end, you're 100% correct the market is tough, but we're a very specialized form builder, made especially for developers. As far as deserving Page 1 - Google used to think so for several years, as my product is pretty darn great if you need flexible form software. We have four versions, two of which are free, covering both self-hosted and SaaS models. No one even comes close to offering such a wide variety of solutions. In short, if you need form software and you find my site you're guaranteed not to be disappointed. If nothing else you're able to choose between two pretty awesome free versions, something no one else offers. I'm also ecstatic to answer questions and help users out, even if they don't buy or use my software. I would think this would be of high value to Google -- and it certainly used to be before the penalty. As far as the site recommendations: I'm taking these to heart for sure, though I have to say, the previously mentioned Google Webmaster forums -- the current site is a direct result of working with them for over 3 months, making the exact same types of changes and improvements. Nothing, and I mean nothing, worked. I didn't know at the time, but it was recently stated by John Mueller from Google that a Penguin recovery is simply not possible until they refresh and release a new version of the Penguin algorithm. So at the end of the day, sadly, (and please do not take this as dismissive as you bet I'll be making changes): my problem is not content or structure, it's that darn link penalty. All the while, and again, I'm not sure who this benefits.

vdaniuk 12y ago

Look, you should dance with Google, not fight it. If your domain(sic!) was pessimized, you just upgrade your site, rewrite content, add more data and images and create a new domain. Then you concentrate on promoting your new website.

seanflyon 12y ago

> Unfortunately loads of spammy links I never created came home to roost Does this mean that users were posting spammy links on your site, that spammy links elsewhere pointed to your site or something else?

rackforms 12y ago
Option 2: spammy links elsewhere pointed to my site. And I do mean spammy, as in pure spam. Almost all came from foreign language sites, and would be in the form of mysite.com as the link and Louis Vuitton|Fancy Watch Brand|Viagra|Etc as the display text. At no point was my site ever compromised. The kicker is it's unknown if these links were actually helping my site at some point, and the penalty was simply a reflection of the links being devalued. @vdaniuk - Totally with ya, but I've actually done that already. In fact, a 301 actually transferred the penalty from the old site to new back in 2012! I'm literally the worst SEO ever, but in my defense I used a 301 to create a smooth transition for my existing users (which number in the thousands). I had no idea that a 301 would be used against me like that. I guess from my point of view then, the objections to changing brand/identity are: a. My brand is something I work hard on, and changing it is confusing for my users, and difficult and time-consuming from a business standpoint (SSL, taxes, etc). What's more... b. My deepest apologies if I'm wrong on this, but I've heard that even if I do change brands, Google has actually made it clear they may follow webmasters who've been penalized, not just the domains they ran. Now it potentially becomes this bizarre cloak and dagger world of hiding from Google, something I'm simply not comfortable with. I'm proud of my past. c. There's been, and I hate that I know this stuff but I do follow the topic closely now, but I've heard that new web site remain in something called the sandbox for much longer now. God I hate that I even said that as I deplore SEO stuff, but starting a new site simply is no guarantee that rank will be restored. Not to mention the aforementioned costs of setting up a storefront, building the site, possibly being targeted for a new penalty for who I am, and so on. But yes, at some point it may very well come down to starting a new site...again.

blauwbilgorgel 12y ago

Did Google notify you of a link-based penalty? You should set up Google Webmaster Tools, if you haven't already. Then you can read notifications about suspicious links pointing to your site and disavow the ones that are spammy. I am not so sure that you are under a link-based penalty. I know you did not ask for this, but I had a look at your website's link profile, source and index health. 1. SEO: The online web form market is hugely saturated. You probably can not compete with Wufoo on terms like "web form builder". Honestly ask yourself if you currently deserve a top 10 spot for this term. Are you a top 10 player in this field? Explore more specific and longtail keywords. Create better targeted pages and page titles. "Documentation - NicSoft Software" is a missed chance. Create more content on the blog (inbound marketing). 2. Links. You do not have enough natural links to beat competitors. They get linked from webdeveloper forums by real users of the software. You also should check out Google's stance on "Powered by"-links. If this turns in the majority of your backlinking profile, you get links from a lot of bad neighborhoods. These links may thus do more harm than good. It is not an editorial link, but probably in exchange for a free version of the product. Much safer to nofollow links created for profit or SEO/online marketing purposes. 3. Site HTML is not well-structured for information retrieval. For every page on your site, the first heading is "Home". Browse your site with styles disabled. Reorder repeating boilerplate code below the relevant page content. Specify a canonical or make sure only one version is served to visitors with redirects (both www- and non-www versions of the site return duplicate content). 4. Index health is poor. Robots.txt file is indexed. There are a few inactive subdomains, an unattended Wordpress and Drupal install in a subdirectory. Includes are indexed as separate pages "/inc/footer.php". Documentation (the content "meat" if the site) is off limits for bots. Over 90% of pages on the site are in the secondary index, which is not a good sign. About 10 hits a day from Google is far too low for any commercial site to survive on. You could get more than 10 hits on a random wordlist. Do not solely think about in-links. Are you even linking to reputable sources yourself? End-node sites are far less interesting for visitors than hub sites.

rackforms 12y ago
Didn't ask for it? If I've learned one thing from this whole affair it's how understanding and kind complete strangers can be. Your feedback is hugely appropriated. That said, a few thoughts: 1. The link based penalty stems from the fact the traffic drops correlate exactly with Penguin release dates. Also, the "official" volunteers and other good folks over at the Google Webmaster forms came to the same conclusion. Before those exact dates I had ranked on page 1 for "php web form software", and page 1 or 2 for "web form software", since mid-2008. To that end, you're 100% correct the market is tough, but we're a very specialized form builder, made especially for developers. As far as deserving Page 1 - Google used to think so for several years, as my product is pretty darn great if you need flexible form software. We have four versions, two of which are free, covering both self-hosted and SaaS models. No one even comes close to offering such a wide variety of solutions. In short, if you need form software and you find my site you're guaranteed not to be disappointed. If nothing else you're able to choose between two pretty awesome free versions, something no one else offers. I'm also ecstatic to answer questions and help users out, even if they don't buy or use my software. I would think this would be of high value to Google -- and it certainly used to be before the penalty. As far as the site recommendations: I'm taking these to heart for sure, though I have to say, the previously mentioned Google Webmaster forums -- the current site is a direct result of working with them for over 3 months, making the exact same types of changes and improvements. Nothing, and I mean nothing, worked. I didn't know at the time, but it was recently stated by John Mueller from Google that a Penguin recovery is simply not possible until they refresh and release a new version of the Penguin algorithm. So at the end of the day, sadly, (and please do not take this as dismissive as you bet I'll be making changes): my problem is not content or structure, it's that darn link penalty. All the while, and again, I'm not sure who this benefits.