I first learned about "reciprocal links" through Glenn Canady and gorillawebsitemarketing.com - I know opinions of Glen vary as an SEO firm, but I always felt that his advice was sound. I know his course helped me learn how to promote a site effectively. Please don't laugh. Anyhoo, his entire network has been PR0'd. His car wax site, his "personal roses" site, his "atkins" site... he's got a big rant going on over at his gorilla website mareting page. Anyway, it seems a little scary that Google would come along and PR0 an entire network of sites just because they're owned by the same person/hosted on same server. Would be interested to hear what you pros have to say about this... --Mark
While I am not familiar with this gentleman, I would think that google didn't discriminate against him but rather his brand of SEO. I could be wrong, but I would think that he over SEO's and set off red flags as something google doesn't appreciate. I could be wrong though LOL
Boy, that guy can sell, sell, sell......... Probably just a google pr fluke and he'll make a mint out of it. As he says himself, he's spent a lot of money on google ads, why would they ban him? They would target those of us that don't buy ads and just try to ride with the free listings if they were going to target anyone. He's not teaching any 'great secrets' that you don't see on any other spammy seo site. His sites aren't banned, just lost I think. Never know for sure though.
The thing that struck me as interesting is that he really doesn't promote anything "black hat". Relevant links with sites that complement yours - that's his whole thing. Lots of links. And yeah, he can sell, but it's good to learn from someone who's good at selling... IMHO. He did have #1 site for "car wax" and at one time gorillawebsitemarketing was #1 for "internet marketing" or "website marketing" or something like that. Those sites don't show up at all now... they're completely GONE. I was just wondering if this isn't an attempt by Google to discourage reciprocal links (for the sole purpose of boosting rankings) by targeting a few individuals who think they know how to "beat the system"... but if that's your goal, why pick on him? and not forums like this one and WMW?
I don't think they are picking on him specifically. Did his SERPS drop to with the drop in PR? Google, to my knowledge, doesn't do things willy nilly and relies on the algo. During every update, some people win and some lose and for the most part, people don't understand the mechanics of what goes into the rise or fall of websites. -edited to fix typo
I agree with him on one thing "NEVER depend on the search engines alone for your traffic. If you do, you will pay a HUGE price for it someday" I have said something to that effect before, from personal experiance with my site, although I wasn't making much when my site was up there anyways, I could only imagine how mad I would be if I lost a lot of income this way.
Yeah, looks like a complete ban, plus he says there are other sites hosted on his machine and all of them are banned to, so maybe it's done by IP address? I do think Google will manually ban a site from time to time, I think linkstoyou.com and zeuscollective.com are examples of sites that earned a manual ban for some reason or another.... obviously anything that creates automatic recip links will be "discouraged" in my opinion....
Hmmm... this is interesting, I'm was looking at his site with the "wayback machine" and he used to boast: And also claimed #1 spots on Yahoo, Google, and #4 on MSN for phrase "car wax" for his 5starshine.com site, but now he's gone from Yahoo, Google, and MSN, I even searched for "gorilla website marketing" and he's gone... BUT, he's still on MSN Beta for term "car wax" and "gorilla website marketing". Which makes me think maybe it's not a mysterious google penalty, but what in the world can you do to your sites (or someone else do to you) to make you drop from Yahoo, MSN and Gooogle?
oh, I thought he would have a greybar if he was banned, but your right, does look like he is banned. site:www.gorillawebsitemarketing.com doesn't show anything from his site, but strangly, does have several other urls listed.
hmmm, and more interesting: site:5starshine.com reports 2550 results...... but only shows two (with omitted results included), and they aren't 5starshine.com Yeh, I bet it was his claims rather than his seo that brought this about.
Kind of like much of the "google bombing" has been manually removed for some of the more "famous" ones.
The links actually result in HTTP redirects based on id: www.legendradiator.com/linkslinkpage.html?id=511 --> www.5starshine.com It seems that these guys are fooling Google with multiple redirects. Try entering this in the Google search box: site:www.5starshine.com dealer You will see a page full of links to various websites, all of them redirected to www.5starshine.com. J.D.
Yep.... do the same search for: site:gorillawebsitemarketing.com business site:atkinsdietplus.com weight these are all his sites... looks like he was seduced by the dark side of the force. Also, if you'll look the the google listings for: site:www.5starshine.com dealer for example, most of the domains with the funky redirects are also PR0'd topkatt.com legendradiator.com radiatordoc.com mazdaradiatorpros.com Wonder if these are similar sites using same spammy technique? Ok, here's a question. How does Google know that someone else didn't set this up? speaking hypothethically... and how would someone go about removing a penalty like this? --Mark
Are you sure those people arn't just bad link partners who use redirects instead of real urls http://www.legendradiator.com/autopart_links_directory/Online+Autoparts.html like that guy all his links out are redirects An I am not really sure if that would do anything for seo , good or bad
Google won't ban without reason - In this guys case, maybe they got a bit pissed off with all the spam email he sent out. If I was running an SE, I'd probabally have banned him. I still get email from him (them), even after I have sent a number of emails stating that I wish to be removed from mailing lists...
gorillamarketing.com was not one of the sites that got banned. I completely wasted $8000 on Glenn Canady's Gorilla Website Marketing Course. The advice I was given was negligent and the claims that were made for how much I was likely to make were simply not true. The current heading on gorilla-internet-marketing.com says "Do you want to learn how to make MILLIONS on the Internet?". It's obviously got even worse than from when I did the course ! I set up a blog to document what happened to me during Glenn Canady's course. If you want to get an example of the sort of thing Glenn Canady was up to that could have (and should have) got his sites banned then I suggest you take a look at this post (it's lengthy !) : http://the-glenn-canady-gorilla-website-marketing-course-review.com/2005/01/glenn-canady-banned-from-google.html I'm amazed that people haven't seen through him before now. Lets face it he was a one-trick pony, and not a very good one at that. He managed to milk a good living off the back of telling people one basic thing that was freely available information, and just about everyone knew anyway - get decent incoming links and don't link to bad sites. He claimed to be a leading SEO expert. What a joke. Chris
Isn't gorillamarketing.com and gorillawebsitemarketing.com the same website? They both have PR0 here. Thanks for the info Chris, I'll check out your blog. --Mark