I run a site critical of a multi-billion dollar corporation that is known for its corruption. Several months ago, around the time it was being publicized all over that the new Google update would put a higher penalty on mass link building, I started noticing visitors were accessing via a lot of spammy search terms. A little investigation revealed that someone was posting blog comment spam links back to my site by the hundreds. Correspondence with some of the bloggers helped me determine that the comments were coming from multiple IP addresses, so most likely from some kind of untraceable bot.

The spam terms weren’t even in the text of the links back to my site, but in the other spam comments that had been left on the blogs for lovely things like breast enhancement and phentermine. Although I was getting extra visits from these new terms (most of which can’t be found on my site AT ALL), at first it didn’t adversely affect my listings for valid searches. That is until the latest Google update in February, when I lost half of my traffic and nearly all of my Google listings. I’m now ranking for a very limited number of legitimate search terms only, and what is missing is so obvious there absolutely must be some kind of penalty.

Check the backlinks and all of the legit links are deeply buried in tons of splog crap, and most of the blogs have been abandoned for years, with no contact information to have the spam comments removed. Google Sitemaps lists the top words linking back to me, which are all spam, with ZERO related to my actual content. In short, this underhanded attempt by this corporation to squash a critic and place a Google penalty on my site was 100% successful and there’s not a darned thing I can do about it. Creating a new domain and starting over will mean an age-related penalty and/or a new opportunity to penalize me with splog.

Now that it is so easy to do, I expect we’ll see a lot more of this kind of dirty trickery. I hope this issue will be addressed in a future update, because no one should be penalized for things that are out of their control, like who is linking back to them.

Sounds like a great conference. We have small online magazine and have been using news releases from PR Newswire as the basis for content when the release contains news which is relevant to our magazine’s overall theme.

Some of the releases contain content which is appropriate to use verbatim, e.g. a Doctor outlines the 10 most relevant healthcare issues for one year olds, Will using this get us in trouble for duplicate content? Also, we often use the exact description provided by those who issue the release describing their organization, company….

Thanks in advance for your input.

I suggested one of the sitemap features (nodes to specify paramaters that do not affect content). I have a problem trying to accurately distinguish the % of legit indexed content on our site versus dup content due to tracking parameters. The site is millions of pages and google index varies between 1/10 and 200x the reasonable number, based on virtual. I would like to send you the results for the past 4 days to get your insight into what is happening. Would you be willing to share your email address?

Thanks,

I wanted to touch base on your Subdomains vs Subfolders comment. Now from what I understand, your preference towards subfolders was based off of site usability? By having your site set up in subfolders, will there be any effect on Google search rankings (positive or negative).

I have completely redesigned our company website and adressed some of hte major problems we were having. We offer many services and to avoid confusing the user with overload, I have separated the services into 5 distinct sections. Each section is set to be its own subdomain and all the pages will contain the same architecture expect for the text and some images of course.

We went with subdomains to accomplish two things. To separate and distinguish each section of our services and to be able to run campaigns which could target a desired service we wanted to increase business in.

Do you see any problem associated with the interlinking of subdomain pages and will there be a negative effect with google on what I said above?

Looking forward to your thoughts

Cheers!

This page shows how to add Google to IE 7:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/searchguide/default_new.mspx

I was really excited when I saw the link to the duplicate content session since I just asked you about it the other day.

I have to admit that I finished the article a bit more confused than when I started though, I guess some of it just went over my head

Thanks for all the info though

Prior to BigDaddy, a site with ~3500 pages was fully indexed (”site:” operator actually showed 23,000) and had Google searchers regularly arriving to 2500 different pages.

After BigDaddy, only 700 pages remain indexed. Despite both versions of the Google crawler fully crawling the site more than ever.

What are the odds this is a technical problem on Google’s side vs. some kind of penalty? Is there a clear way to distinguish?