What's the Worst Google Has Screwed You?

[MrX]

With the recent threads on dramatic SERP drops, and that guy who lost 2 employees "because of Google", I thought it would be good to ask: what's the worst thing that happened to you as a result of a Google SERP change, or even AdSense change?

[Mong]

My one very clean site doesn't appear on first page
Niche is Education.
And no black hat at all except some days of coop use.

Its indexed well but have valuable inbound links as well.

[Antz]

I hear all these stories about Google screwing people over, and pissing them of, but they've been fine for me, they've only penalized me for stuff that I deserve.

[1EightT]

I once had an 8 year old pr6 site get completely banned for no reason. It took 6 months for me to get it back in the index.

[SEOSURAT]

Sometime this happens due to link farm and bad links you got

[vid]

It is really interesting, what do you think maybe google page ranking algorithm has some bugs. Because I know lot of people that has such problems (from nowhere) ...

[ferret77]

I have tons of banned domains ...

but I think the worst is they are punishing good pages on a website because there are "bad" pages on a website

and by bad I mean duplicate, if you have a great site about dogs, and you add some pages of amazon products for dogs, so you can earn a few bucks off your site

The good pages of the site should not be punished for that

[tbarr60]

With SERP's, I take anything I get as gravy, it's free traffic, Google doesn't owe me any traffic. I just need to be diverse in my topics so I don't get crushed if one sites slips in the rankings. They create algorythms, they don't include code to get some little guy. I don't flatter myself by thinking they are doing something with me as the target. Any damage is friendly fire.

[teamshop]

Putting my entire PR5 download site into their supplemental index definately wasn't nice of them...

[karan265]

Google AdSense screwed my happines...

I lost so much money

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=200995

[oseymour]

Originally Posted by karan265

Google AdSense screwed my happines...

I lost so much money

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=200995

sorry to hear...they have been good to me....never had a banned site...I love google

[minnseoelite]

technically google does not screw anyone its an algorithm a computer so if you have a site that has something really bad happen to it either 1. You finally got caught with your spamming black hat ways 2. You where lazy and did not work on your sites content or incoming links enough to deserve to hold your ranking 3. Some a** Google bowled your site cause they was pissed off at you.

[tbarr60]

Originally Posted by minnseoelite

Google bowled

Somehow I missed that term and it's been around for a year. Could I have Google bowled my own site by putting site wide links to my site from another one of my sites? I have sites with over 200 pages and add links and banner ads globally to help out a new site when I launch. I feel better about giving myself site wide links than I do submitting my sites lots of directories. My links on my sites are pure advertising, directories are just links for search engine bots to see.

Am I Google Bowling myself with my site wides?

[kevinn]

Google doesnt screw anyone, if you dropped in the rankings - it's either something you did to cause it or your competitors are working harder then you.

[minnseoelite]

Originally Posted by tbarr60

Somehow I missed that term and it's been around for a year. Could I have Google bowled my own site by putting site wide links to my site from another one of my sites? I have sites with over 200 pages and add links and banner ads globally to help out a new site when I launch. I feel better about giving myself site wide links than I do submitting my sites lots of directories. My links on my sites are pure advertising, directories are just links for search engine bots to see.

Am I Google Bowling myself with my site wides?

Sitewide links are ok to a degree just dont over due it. More often than anything Google bowling occures when one of your competitors places thousands of links to your site on non related bad neighborhood sites using all kinds of crap anchor text.

[NetMidWest]

Originally Posted by minnseoelite

technically google does not screw anyone its an algorithm a computer so if you have a site that has something really bad happen to it either 1. You finally got caught with your spamming black hat ways 2. You where lazy and did not work on your sites content or incoming links enough to deserve to hold your ranking 3. Some a** Google bowled your site cause they was pissed off at you.

You probably never heard of a 302 hijack, nor seen one. At this time, it seems fixed, but the effect was that you loose your serps, pagerank, everything. It took awhile to figure out that linking absolutely would solve most of the problem (they would need some good links to get Google's attention and time to let the duplicate content penalty pass) but linking relatively is a perfectly allowable method, simplifies scripts, and can decrease a page's size. 302 redirects were used as click tracking long before Google came around, and they did nothing while this problem raged for quite some time. See this section of the same page: http://clsc.net/research/google-302-page-hijack.htm#004

I was caught in more than one, working to get de-listed from one site, only to find another taking over. Many were spammy Adsense pages, and Google had no motivation until enough attention was drawn to the problem that temporary fixes were placed, making it a rarity. But it would still happen occasionally, particularly to brand new sites or domains that would receive attention quicker than solid links could be built. It really stunted the growth of many sites and companies.

Fixed or not, everyone should link absolutely - with the full http-domain-file version, not /file or ../file, etc., as the problem has been seen elsewhere, and I don't trust Google not to roll back to an algo or crawling pattern that would bring it back. Many engineers did not see it as a big problem, or saw it as something wrong with the site itself. It can take some effort to link absolutely, editing scripts, templates, etc., but...

A mistake made once can be made again.

[cafinater]

Google has more humans than ever looking at sites. a few sites I know of had a human visitor from google, and soon after had penalties.

[cafinater]

If you suddenly start making a LOT of money from adsense, (i.e. $300 a day) due to great Google SERPs, and then after a time it suddenly drops off again, did Google screw you, or give you a break in the first place? Believe me, if you start to hit the big money, don't count on it continuing... If it does, great, but DON'T count on it... (now it's back to fighting hard for every little increase...)

[JohnScott]

PR8 to PR0 kind of hurt. But just because at that time PR was more closely tied to rankings.

[naphets66]

Christmas 2004 they banned a site of mine. Not one since, luckily. I have changed my ways a little. I went from $5000 a month to zero and was looking at the tax man coming in three months.