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My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

cringely.com

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Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#101

Post by ChuckMcM »

sergiotapia wrote: post #77
300bps wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello friend. You seem angry so I'm going to attempt to tread lightly as I throw some friendly suggestions out. 1. Do you have a verified valid robots.txt that Google can read? 2. Does your verified valid robots.txt point to a verified valid sitemap or sitemap index? 3. Did your submit your verified valid sitemap or sitemap index to Google Webmaster Tools? Based on the responses to this, I or someone else might be ab…

I'm not angry, just trying to drive a point home using colorful language. 1. Yes, I have that. 2. Yes, I also have that. 3. Here's an actual screenshot of my google webmaster tools for my website: http://i.imgur.com/9Nwgts1.png Remember: We're now closing in on 6 months with Google just not crawling my site whereas other search engines crawl near daily.

Two other pieces of information would be great here.

1) What is the URL in question.

2) When you click the 'why not' link what does it say?

The other (possibly not relevant) question is whether or not you have any Google advertising or not on your site. I'm not suggesting that there is a 'pay for play' here, what I'm looking at is that when you use 'AdsenseForContent' or (AfC) the only way Google can know what sort of ads would make sense on your page is to crawl them first. If you had AfC ads on your page and Google wasn't crawling them, then that would suggest that your URLs are black listed for some reason. At Blekko our crawler tries to avoid sites that are either patently malicious (they've got known exploits in their pages) or on a list of malware/childporn sites, or have complex page structures that don't involve recursive crawling loops.

What is the URL of your site?

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#102

Post by sergiotapia »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #101
sergiotapia wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not angry, just trying to drive a point home using colorful language. 1. Yes, I have that. 2. Yes, I also have that. 3. Here's an actual screenshot of my google webmaster tools for my website: http://i.imgur.com/9Nwgts1.png Remember: We're now closing in on 6 months with Google just not crawling my site whereas other search engines crawl near daily.

Two other pieces of information would be great here. 1) What is the URL in question. 2) When you click the 'why not' link what does it say? The other (possibly not relevant) question is whether or not you have any Google advertising or not on your site. I'm not suggesting that there is a 'pay for play' here, what I'm looking at is that when you use 'AdsenseForContent' or (AfC) the only way Google can know what sort o…

My url is: http://www.smitecamp.com

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#103

Post by russelluresti »

sergiotapia wrote: post #34
ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

And apparently Mr Cringely doesn't know anything about Webmaster Tools, which would probably be the first stop of anyone wanting to know about a sudden change in rank. Sudden changes are usually the function of 'action' rather than 'inaction' so I'm guessing that somewhere there was an action. Did she succumb to some black hat SEO marketing pitch? Did Cringely piss off some black hat SEO person? Did her site get comp…

You're talking out of your ass and it's really infuriating to hear people disregard real, tangible problems you are facing. Google makes software, and no software is perfect. I've been bitten by shitty google services before. My most recent sting was Google Webmaster Tools not showing any Googlebot crawls to me website. My website is very niche and literally 1 of 4 competitors in the same arena. 5 month. 5 MONTHS. an…

Some things that may explain things:

According to ahrefs, the number of referring pages (a big factor search results) dropped from about 22k pages to well under 1k over the course of 2 months starting at the end of march (source: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/www.por...).

Additionally, it seems the site does show up in Google search results on the 10th page (https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=photo%20quilts#h...).

I'll be honest, I don't understand what exactly that means, but it seems to have happened at around the same timeframe that you're referring to (5 or 6 months ago), so I'm going to bet it's a factor.

Hope you figure it out - the whole search engine algorithm thing is really complex.

But, honestly, I don't believe that Google just stopped working for a single domain. The more likely scenario is that something you/your sister is unaware of changed and had a large negative result.

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#104

Post by ChuckMcM »

sergiotapia wrote: post #102
ChuckMcM wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two other pieces of information would be great here. 1) What is the URL in question. 2) When you click the 'why not' link what does it say? The other (possibly not relevant) question is whether or not you have any Google advertising or not on your site. I'm not suggesting that there is a 'pay for play' here, what I'm looking at is that when you use 'AdsenseForContent' or (AfC) the only way Google can know what sort o…

My url is: http://www.smitecamp.com

And what is your relationship to https://www.hirezstudios.com/smitegame/home ? I ask because it seems like you share a lot of material. Game studios get a bit twitchy about that when it isn't part of their PR plan.

Hmm, if that were the case I'd expect it to show up in the Transparency report though.

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#105

Post by true_religion »

eropple wrote: post #76
mkhaytman wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd contend you're the one talking out of their ass. Relying on another company for all your business isn't a sound business strategy. The person in the article put all their eggs in one basket and this is the result.

This is trivializing to the point of absurdity. When it comes to doing business on the Internet in the English-speaking world, Google is the basket. It's the only basket. I wish it weren't, but it is. And so, yes, pretty much everyone is reliant on them to be good stewards of the power they possess. (Whether they are or not is orthogonal to that the quilter in question has a pretty good reason to feel like they aren'…

I really can't agree with that. We've built businesses in the pre-Google days when search engines were a hit or miss affair.

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#106

Post by eropple »

true_religion wrote: post #105
eropple wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is trivializing to the point of absurdity. When it comes to doing business on the Internet in the English-speaking world, Google is the basket. It's the only basket. I wish it weren't, but it is. And so, yes, pretty much everyone is reliant on them to be good stewards of the power they possess. (Whether they are or not is orthogonal to that the quilter in question has a pretty good reason to feel like they aren'…

I really can't agree with that. We've built businesses in the pre-Google days when search engines were a hit or miss affair.

Except that now everyone goes to Google. It's not just a search engine, it's literally the starting point for the overwhelming majority of web traffic.

If Google is against you, you're done.

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#107

Post by momokatte »

shobhitverma wrote: post #87
jenno wrote: post #25

Has this sister ever engaged in any dubious SEO practices, such as hiring "backlink providers" on fiverr, spamming her link on unrelated websites, or too much prolific use of using the anchor text of "portrait quilt"? Any of those will signal to Google that they are unnatural links and as a result, the site can be penalized and show up less in results, sometimes being removed altogether. I apologize if this comment i…

This is pretty interesting. So I can theoretically bring down a competitor's rank by creating spammy websites and providing unnatural backlinks ? Even if the competitors figure it out from the webmaster tools, they will have no way to remove the backlinks. Right ?

Backlinks can be disavowed via Webmaster Tools.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487

Related:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2309486/Matt-Cutts-Use-...

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#108

Post by 300bps »

sergiotapia wrote: post #102
ChuckMcM wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two other pieces of information would be great here. 1) What is the URL in question. 2) When you click the 'why not' link what does it say? The other (possibly not relevant) question is whether or not you have any Google advertising or not on your site. I'm not suggesting that there is a 'pay for play' here, what I'm looking at is that when you use 'AdsenseForContent' or (AfC) the only way Google can know what sort o…

My url is: http://www.smitecamp.com

Your robots.txt is nothing but comments. It doesn't specify the URL of your sitemap. It does have a blanket disallow for all user agents for the root of your site. It is commented out (like everything else) but if that was ever uncommented that could be your problem.

I guessed your sitemap URL since it isn't in your robots.txt. You have every single page listed as being updated hourly. Even if that is true I wouldn't put that in there.

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#109

Post by grey-area »

wmf wrote: post #100
grey-area wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of those channels rely on guiding people to search engines, or at the very least being findable on search engines by name. To take this example, your website is called portrait quilts, the url is http://portraitquilts.com/ - so you do loads of advertising on twitter, print media, word of mouth etc, and people try to find your site. You can try to guide them to a unique url, but often people won't remember urls,…

One free thing you can do to optimize marketing is to not name your business a generic term . If your business has a unique name you generally don't have to worry about competitors outranking you for the name. For example, I don't think my brother will ever get outranked for "porcelain rocket"; he currently owns not just the top spot but the entire first page.

Plenty of products/services like Windows, Xerox, tipex start as generic terms or become them during their lifetime. I'm not saying that they should therefore always come first, but it's instructive if you compare xerox to this website - they dominate the entire first page of google results. What should come first is what would be useful for end users, and I think it's fair to expect a company named after and with an url of a phrase to come at least once on that first page, if lots of people link to them (as from other search engine results they appear to). If that's not the case, Google should be transparent about why these penalties are applied. I understand why they don't want to be transparent for commercial reasons and to stop people gaming the system, but think given their monopoly position it behoves them to be so. Otherwise they can destroy businesses maliciously or, even worse, with complete indifference.

Personally I find Google is providing results which are less and less useful, with their recent emphasis on monetising search, indifference to fairness, and lack of transparency as to their ranking methods - it certainly seems as if in this case a draconian penalty has been applied, and there is no effective way to appeal or even find out what the judgement against them was (webmasters very often is not helpful). A penalty of a few places would be completely understandable if they don't like this site for whatever reason, a penalty of 8 pages while other spammy results dominate search terms is not.

I've switched to DuckDuckGo for now and it's pretty good. Compare the results for Tipex (a popular brand of correction fluid in Europe) for example:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tipex https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tipex

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#110

Post by memracom »

Just don't trust your business to a "site". If it is your business, then your "site" should include a blog that should have regular articles about all sorts of related things, including about other related sites who hopefully have their own blogs and will write about your site. There needs to be a buzz of activity around your business or people will stop coming in the door.

Dirty windows? Spider webs in the doorframe? Trash on the sidewalk? Paint fading? Lightbulb burned out? Sign peeling? These are signs that the business is dying and the passersby will gladly help you out by not shopping there and by telling their friends to avoid the place.

Life is like that in the real world; why should the Internet be any different?

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