Having just replied to someone elses post about this earlier today I researched it a little more... Apparently it's when blackhatters submit your website to a backlink generator to spam your website to make it look like you are over-optimizing. Thus resulting in a sandbox and losing your high rank in Google. I don't mean to alarm anyone, I just wanted to find out some more information about the process and more importantly what can be done to prevent this happening. I personally find it sick that some one would do this to some one who's worked hard for a time period on a site to get it ranked. But, one way to look at it is do you think that person feels good inside? After all, that is the definition of success in my eyes - feeling genuinely good inside regardless. We've all been there where we've mysteriously had our page suddenly disappear from the search engines. I wonder.........????
Here you go, some more informative information I found http://www.webpronews.com/expertart...n-sabotage-you-what-google-should-do-about-it Just type Google Bowling into google also. This is where I found the above YM
thanks! I'll definitely check that out as I think this may have happened to me at the beginning of the year.
I feel for ya. Serious scumbags mate! I mean, Im not saying this is why everyone suddenly disappears but I wouldn't be surprised if stuff like this had something to do with it. I have had the odd ranking just 'disappear' in the past. I got really confused and couldn't figure out why this happened. I'm not sure how to resolve it quickly but I think over time then Google will re-instate your ranking as this is what I experienced at the time. But even still, it can harm your income drastically for a couple months, if not longer. It's merely just a reason why this happens to you and to not get disheartened at yourself and your SEO skills. Any help on dealing with this matter or past experiences will be appreciated!
The article you cited is 3 1/2 yrs. old. I could be wrong, but I seriously doubt G does that any more, otherwise if you bought a banner ad and it just happened to show up on some porn sites or some such, you'd get banned. Was it one of your sites that got penalized or banned? Sorry, I didn't see you other thread. If so, how can you tell that "Google bowling" was the reason? I'm not insinuating, just asking.
Hey, couldn't agree more. I've just seen it floating around recently in here and online. I agree, I'm not saying it is "Google Bowling" as such but I just wanted to find out more myself as I have had sites disappear from the rankings in the past as Im sure other people have.
OK, got it. Just don't do the stupid mistakes I did. If you're logged into your Google account, your search results can be customized or filtered (and not necessarily in a good way). This happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I couldn't find my own site by name or domain and I was panicking all over the place. A couple changes of underwear later a buddy told me he had no problem finding it on his PC. WTF? So after poking around it seems my browser had decided to "hide" my own site from search results. How that happened I have no idea since I never click on those "add/remove this site" links, unless I was sleep browsing at the time. So a few clicks later I found the link where you can purge all the setting and it was all good again. The tricky part is that Google doesn't even tell you that you search results have been filtered, or at least I couldn't see any such warning.
Yea, it happens and google an't smart enough to deal with it. Some people do get overboard and the best thing you can do is just report to google and see what they can do about it.
google does penalize, for sure. but usually the penalties are done by people who screw up their websites, not compete too heavily for keywords