Google just shut down my business of 11 years by deciding to rank me to the bottom, why... who knows. I spent a lot of money with them over the years with google ad-words, do they care... no! SEO not perfect, bla, bla, bla, don't bother, not the cause. I've been worried about there monopoly for years, and yesterday it did not suprise me one bit that big brother shut down the most content relavant site in my particular industry for no apparent reason. Google is just a search engine, a stupid search engine that decided to get rid of the bullshit fluff on there homepage. Great idea, neat, like the pet rock, but not some great technological achievement. Wake up, Google is just a silly search engine turned monopoly!
Um, chill out. I understand your frustration, but you're pretty stupid for letting your whole business rely on one company referring folks to it. That's your failure - not Google's.
Work on your site to find out what happened. Sounds like update did not like something on your site. You can also still use adwords to keep sales up while you work out the problem.
I think you did mostake relying on only one thing..that is google. I think it is failure to forsee risks and failure to manage it beforhand. But, I am sorry for hwt happened you!!!
Its not a monopoly yet, don't worry. Move on to yahoo, you can still easily get about 80% of what you earned from google, and once you start advertising on yahoo, maybe google will see how much potential $$ they lost, and they will put you back on top. Just my 2 cents.
It could be this: It seems Google has changed their algo and one thing they've been making quite a bit of noise about is paid links ...
And it couldn't be that you operate multiple sites which were selling links for their PageRank value, could it?
Yes, actually you shut yourself down, based on the replies so far. Even for non-internet-dependent services I'm recommending brushing search engines aside... http://www.mdvaden.com/website_traffic.shtml Even in 1 year, I've read enough to see the risk from depending on search engines. But it doesn't mean all is lost. There is often a way to pull out of the dive.
Yes, Try to build traffic with yahoo, msn, make a forum, etc etc. Really depend of Google is very bad. I have experiece about this problem I understand you. Best luck! Jakomo
well if you sold backlinks how can you blaime google they told you or Matt told you they did not like it but anyway i am sorry for it
As compared with many others, I would think Google is one of the most ethical ones left around. Ah well, differences in opinion!
It's pretty scary - that Google is now playing "big" brother. I gather some disturbing posts about Google here and here on how to report paid links to Google.
The big question is. Do you have a lot of unrelated outgoing links on your site ? Or get a lot of links in from unrelated sites/pages?
Paid links could be an issue, but Google wont penalise you for them, it will just discount them, but if your site relied very heavily on them then that will go against you in the rankings. If the drop in SERPS only happened in the last couple of days then you should wait 2 weeks before changing anything on your site to try and fix it, rankings go up and down at times and normally settle back down within a couple of weeks. If after 2 weeks your rankings are still no good, and for some reason Google has chosen your domain to bully, you should relaunch with a new domain, at a new host and with revised content, and if you know why they dropped you fix that problem too, and try and get more natural links and less paid ones.
Nevertheless, I am very interested in the permanent PR 8 link, so please send me details about it. Middle finger to Google (hey, they can take it)
I think I understand what he was doing with Google. We sold PR8 links for a profit. So, apparently, he can't switch to Yahoo or MSN, because they don't have "PageRank System" in place. Thus, once shut out from Google, he is out of business, at least with that particular business model.