Getting Penalized By Google

Google is a curious thing. An enigma that is needed by almost all in the online world, but understood by few. Google has taken on an almost mythical status because of its unyielding power over what consumers access, see and possibly buy. For those in the SEO world, you have to do well with google rankings or nothing else matters.

As most know, google has an unpublished set of criteria for ranking websites. The reason is so anyone with an interest in seeing their website perform well will not be able to reverse engineer the algorithm. The only guidance provided by google is inluded in their vague webmaster guidelines. Which basically say have a good site and don't manipulate things to try and game their system. The threat is that anyone caught by google trying to game their system may have their website penalized or removed from the index. Does it catch everyone? No. Does it snare some that didn't intend to game the system. Absolutely. Do you have to consider google for any changes you make to your site? You better believe it.

This blog was created to document the ongoing SEO environment of the bail bonds industry. With particular emphasis on the Las Vegas bail bonds industry that we serve. Our intent was to make this a written history of our efforts and at the same time make observations about the field in general. As you can imagine, the first link we put up was to our own Las Vegas bail bonds website. Was it to game the system? No. A link, from a PR0 blog is not going to help our cause. We put it up as a way to say, this is what we've been working on. Were we going to add links to other sites? Yes! But these posts are a process, not an end result. So our approach was to add links over time based on what we were seeing. Unfortunately, this blog was penalized as a result of the link to our other website and dissappeared from the google index altogether. How do we know it was penalized? When searching for "http://bail-bonds-seo.blogspot.com" in google, the actual blog was not included in the results.

We pretty easily figured out what had happened and removed the link to our other site. After which, we used the reconsider function in the google webmaster tools to ask that this blog be added back into the index. Within 48 hours it was. The moral of the story is that webmasters and online professionals need to carefully think about both the actual and perceived intent of their actions with a website. For us, it didn't matter too much that this site was penalized since this site is for fun. If it goes away, that is OK. However, if it had happened to one of our commercial websites, that would have been big trouble. According to google, it may take weeks (or never for that matter) to have a penalized website added back into their index. You have to ask yourself before making changes, why am I doing this and can this be perceived as trying to game the system? Hopefully google will agree with you.