Ever had any run ins with google?

[Jimmy]

Have you ever had any problems with google on your site? E.g have you ever been blacklisted?

I'm proud to say I've never had any trouble with google

 

[StevenF50]

I never have however I probably should have after some greyish hat methods.

 

[Shortie861]

So far so good for me never had any problems that I know of with google myself, the only time I did have a problem it didn't involve me being blacklisted but it was to do with Adsense. I had an Adsense account that I was using and my email address changed so I contacted them about changing my email address for my Adsense account and they sent me a link to a page to change it however the link worked but all the information to do it wasn't there and despite me contacting them and informing them they never really helped me at all so I gave up.

 

[lowrider.STi]

No...everything was ok. That's because I respect the googls TOS and avoid blackhat.

 

[SeanFace101]

Not as far as i know concerning my website & its ranking in the search engine, but i have had my google adsense account closed for a reason unknown to me. I would be quite gutted if i got penilized by google and i lost any of my search positions for that.

 

[isuit21]

My websites only contain White Hat content and I doubt that they will get blacklisted for some reason. I am not quite sure which type of websites Google sets on the blacklist though and for how long.

 

[Shole]

NEver blacklisted but banned from google adsense and that's a problem for me as i earned like 50$ then :S

 

[BigBigFan]

I was hoping to read some epic battles between scorned publishers and Google, I'm sure they exist! As for me I've never been penalized, that I know of, and am not worried about it since I do nothing remotely worthy of being questionable. Boring is safe, unfortunately.

 

[Samurai]

I was hit pretty bad by Penguin. In fact, after my sites were hit by Penguin, I stopped working on them because it was close to impossible to regain rankings (my traffic dropped to a few visits daily). Later I was hit by the EMD update (exact match domains), and another of my sites was hit by another Penguin update (50% drop in traffic, lost all rankings in top10). After all these problems with Google I decided to return to white hat methods.

 

[BigBigFan]

Samurai, you had to know they'd eventually figure out your blackhat methods right? Some of the smartest people on the planet work for Google. I remembered one funny incident I had with Google, they blocked my being able to rank for my main keyword and so all of my search listings had that word removed from titles. It looked pretty funny, this was years ago though.

 

[Samurai]

I haven't been using "very" black hat methods. I was just creating high-quality blogs and writing articles for sites like Squidoo that were linking to my main site, and then building hundreds of low-quality links to these sites. It wasn't anything really black hat like spamming forums or comment blogs. I guess I used the same anchor too many times...

 

[BigBigFan]

Hah, that sucks Samurai. At least you can turn around and point some of the spammy links at your competitor and let Google figure it out.

Just kidding, I don't recommend that because one way or another Google wants to give you a hard time if you own a lot of sites.

 

[Tara]

No, I haven't had any run ins with Google. I try my best to play by the rules. I do mostly white hat SEO. Sometimes, I stray into the gray hat area, but I really try to keep my hands clean.

 

[BigBigFan]

Has it paid off Tara? Can you remember even one single time in which you did something whitehat and noticed your traffic jump dramatically? people who prefer blackhat find ways to make their traffic spike all the time, though it's usually short lived.

Isn't it frustrating to keep adding content only to see your visitor numbers stay at the same level anyway? Check analytics, you've been busy all month but did your total traffic increase? For most it doesn't.

 

[deansaliba]

I too have been a good boy for Google. Although this has reminded me of the time when John Chow was kicked off the search engine for selling loads of paid links and his "diabolical" link scheme. He then went on to prove that you don't need Google to be successful and did very well for three years until they let him back in.

 

[BigBigFan]

John puts on a good show but he's also a savy webmaster. He implemented the nofollow meta tag on his review pages so that his site will still rank for those reviews but will not pass any rank off the pages. The buyers see a dofollow link but forget to check for a nofollow page

 

[Tara]

Has it paid off Tara? Can you remember even one single time in which you did something whitehat and noticed your traffic jump dramatically? people who prefer blackhat find ways to make their traffic spike all the time, though it's usually short lived.

Isn't it frustrating to keep adding content only to see your visitor numbers stay at the same level anyway? Check analytics, you've been busy all month but did your total traffic increase? For most it doesn't.

Yes, it really does, but my current focus is local. I do create a ton of content across a variety of platforms.

Playing the Blackhat game means you'll always be looking over your shoulder. Your sites can tank overnight. Google is aggressively pursuing blackhat marketers. I don't doubt that employees of Google join blackhat forums and use blackhat services to deconstruct what they do. No thanks. I'll still with whitehat.

 

[Jessi]

No, I haven't.

I did, briefly, back almost 10 years ago when I was first starting out, use a different name and buy a program that turned out to be blackhit. Google banned me from Adsense within 24 hours and I demanded my money back from the company. I've never done anything like that again.

 

[Tara]

No, I haven't.

I did, briefly, back almost 10 years ago when I was first starting out, use a different name and buy a program that turned out to be blackhit. Google banned me from Adsense within 24 hours and I demanded my money back from the company. I've never done anything like that again.

I'm very curious. What type of program was it? I hope you got your money back.

 

[Jessi]

I'm very curious. What type of program was it? I hope you got your money back.

I don't even remember much about it now. More or less it was to set up an affiliate page for some workout program, if I can recall correctly. The material itself seemed fine at the time. I just didn't know that that sort of thing wasn't allowed with Adsense.....the same thing that all of the program's claims to money were based on. Without Adsense, there was no money, so to get banned immediately? Not good.