Google's monopolistic practices dictating which websites live and die are out of control

a reply to: PhysicsAlive

By the way, I just put up an avatar after many years of not having one. I hope you all like it

a reply to: VirusGuard

Another HUGE hypocrisy from Google is that they just recently completely banned paid "guest blogging" as a means to improve website SEO. Now, if you pay someone to do "guest blogging" to promote your website, you likely will receive a penalty from Google. One of their main reasons they give for doing this is that it is somehow wrong to pay money to someone to put up a link that promotes your site. Huh? Isn't this just basic advertising 101?

However, they seem to be very happy to take peoples money to put up a link to promote their site with a Google AdWords campaign!

By destroying guest blogging, they make it even harder for anyone to promote their website without paying them tons of money for their AdWords.

I can provide links to videos and documentation on this if anyone is interested.

I cant help but notice how you carefully worded your post to not reveal any detail about what your web site actually does, to me this give the suspicion that even you dont think your website was of a completely legal nature, and if that is the case then google has every right to penalize your website.

a reply to: ObedientSheeple

The reason why I have been careful to not reveal what my website does is that I did not want to be using this post as a means to promote my website, which would be a type of spam and also (I think) a violation of the ATS terms of service. There are very, very few sites out there which do what we do, and there is only one other site that does it reasonably well. So, if I said what the website does it would be easy to find it. Then, people would flame me for using this post as a means to promote my website, and call me a spammer. I hate spam as much as anyone, and I don't believe in using board posts to promote your own website unless it is specifically on topic for the board. And even then, maybe it isn't so great to do self promotion in this way.

You may not believe me, but our website is totally legal in nature and in fact someone on our team is an attorney who spent a lot of time to make sure that our legal disclaimers, privacy policy, and similar things were solid. We have not engaged in any blackhat practices of any sort and the site is very family friendly. If I did tell you what the website was, you might (or might not) think it was useful, but you would consider it ordinary and mundane in nature - just a useful service. I wish I could just give you the URL, but I'm afraid that this would go against my original intent for this post, and that if I posted it people (and possibly the ATS moderators) would hate me.

a reply to: PhysicsAlive

Man you don't need to convince me about anything Google does and they are taking a leaf out of microsofts book too.

Chrome uses the Chromium engine and you can get an open sourse copy to remove all the Google crap like many people including myself have done but its about getting people to use the rendering engine one way or another (Much like pirate windows that still gets updates by MS) because the more Google can drag you down a road that they control the more power they get and when it suites them to introduce something to kill off all the home made browsers then thats just what they will do.

I was contacted about a year ago by a man that was spending $10,000 a month plus with an add server who also served facebook and he managed to send me his logs from his php server that I imported into a DB and I ran some SQL

Select count(ID) from logs groups by IP where Page='Start'

The count went into the hundreds over a week or so for most of the IPs and when you looked to see how long they stayed on the site then it was often less than a second but looking at the various ga reports the man could see nothing wrong.

Bottom line is look for conversion ratios before paying anyone and import the logs to a DB so you can see who's real and who's not. Use a bit of ajax/json to set flags so you know script has been executed and render favicon.ico from code that records a hit because browsers need to dowload this for the bookmark or history icon and professonal paid scammers might automate IE to execute scripts but they will forget to come for the sites icon.

paying Google to run an AD-Scense campaign and then trusting Google to produce reports is just plain old stupid but its what most people do and watchout for where you put your gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-1234-7']) code because you can run code to google bomb the servers and then google will have you on page 999

Try this to see how bad things have become with fakeing data.

Go to paste-bin,com without loggin on and post something without a title and lets says c++ and then keep pressing refresh every ten second to see the click count only slowing down after 60 seconds as it gets close to 100. Now post something with an interesting "You need to know this" title and watch the click count again.

Boomark the links and check a week later and you would be doing well if the "You need to know this" has received hardly any more clicks that the empty title and both will max out at about 130 clicks.

Logic tells you something is very wrong with these numbers

originally posted by: ObedientSheeple
I cant help but notice how you carefully worded your post to not reveal any detail about what your web site actually does, to me this give the suspicion that even you dont think your website was of a completely legal nature, and if that is the case then google has every right to penalize your website.

Give over man I have several web-sites and many accounts on sites like this and I am always careful not to cross refernce anything apart from where I want to.

Was he to give the address of his site out here then he would get a kick up the bum from me for spamming his site on ATS.

I see you have not made many posts like me and I still don't have an avatar

originally posted by: PhysicsAlive
a reply to: VirusGuard

Another HUGE hypocrisy from Google is that they just recently completely banned paid "guest blogging" as a means to improve website SEO. Now, if you pay someone to do "guest blogging" to promote your website, you likely will receive a penalty from Google. One of their main reasons they give for doing this is that it is somehow wrong to pay money to someone to put up a link that promotes your site. Huh? Isn't this just basic advertising 101?

However, they seem to be very happy to take peoples money to put up a link to promote their site with a Google AdWords campaign!

If you want publicity and advertisement from a TV channel, do you pay somebody else? Sure, you can hire a PR agent to do some stunt or write a book, but the TV channel can decide that they've seen enough of that sort of stuff and not put you on the headlines. If you want guaranteed exposure from a channel you buy an ad from the channel.

I think the reason Google downrates it is because average users find those sorts of sites commonly promoted to be lower quality than ones which get intrinsically linked over long periods of time by word of mouth because there is an authentic community and content.

originally posted by: mbkennel
I think the reason Google downrates it is because average users find those sorts of sites commonly promoted to be lower quality than ones which get intrinsically linked over long periods of time by word of mouth because there is an authentic community and content.

No sorry but I think you are wrong or you are saying that the internet only has 1000-2000 sites of any quality and how would you know without seeing the site or building web sites anything about the quality.

Can Google Influence an Election?
www.huffingtonpost.com...

Google, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter are carring out censorship on a world wide scale and have become worse than China and this it seems to me has gone into overdrive about six months ago.

The thing with Google is they use every excuse going from SOPA made us do it, Technical bugs, Governments make us do it but it was China that kicked Google out for NSA spying not that you would know looking at any google results. Download and view googles ga.js if you are left in any doubt about just how far Google goes to spy on you.

Tailered results from Google is just a means to hide what they are doing, it's a smoke screen as they can argue that no two search results are ever the same but if you don't think it works like that then open a new twitter account and start tweeting something negative about Google or Samsung or Paypal and see how long you last before no one talks to you.

Now open a second account and send the same tweets but replace the name Samsung with LG and you can tweet until the cows come home and you will get RT's too. Twitter don't close the accounts unless you have a go at them about stopping your tweets and they just leave you tweeting to yourself but if you try to send PM's to people that follow you then you will soon see them stop you using one excuse or another.

mbkennel try it and come back and tell me I am wrong

a reply to: mbkennel

I fully agree that Google should downrate any *links* from sites that are used for this type of paid "guest blogging". However, it doesn't make sense to me that they would give a broad and aggressive SEO penalty so that ANY search results for your site (including your domain name) show on something like the 40th page (you basically don't exist). They should just not give any "link juice" to promote your SEO based on such links, the same way as if links to your site use the nofollow tag.

When they give this kind of SEO penalty Google is acting as a type of "internet police force". If you pay for something that is basically a sponsored advertisement, even if it is very low quality, misleading and crappy in nature, how does Google have the authority to give you an umbrella type of penalty for this, where your entire website suffers? Giving a penalty is very, very different from them just not giving "link juice" the way they would if there was a high quality link from a reputable site. Simply put, it's not their business what kinds of crappy advertising you are paying for that isn't Google advertising.

Note that for our website we've done nothing of this nature, so it's a somewhat different issue with whatever it is that resulted in Google giving this penalty to our site.

a reply to: ObedientSheeple

Seems like this might be a lose/lose thing for me. If I gave the link to my site, I would be seen as a spammer and this thread would probably be deleted by ATS moderators. If I don't, then people are suspicious that there is something "illegal" or "sketchy" about my website.

Ask yourself this: Why would I start this thread if I had a sketchy or illegal website? What purpose would that serve, unless I had an ulterior motive of trying to promote that site and gave a link to my site in my post? The very fact that I *don't* give any information about my site should prove to you that this is a sincere post.

I will tell you how bad its become with Twitter.

A few years ago Facebook said it users insisted on pages being HTTPS/SSL and trying to get anyone to host SSL for free is far from easy so I commited the sin of using Google to host some content for me so that I could embed it in facebook.

Now Googles upload form lets you embed HTML but no _javascript like most blog type host do so I upload the pages and never used the Gmail account again because we all know google reads every thing.

Now later I posted links on twitter to these pages that were hosted by Google and because Twitter did not like the content they blocked all the Url after a while and if you click the twitter links then you get a message about the site might contain a virus or is spamming everyone.

Well twitter are you saying that you bed partner Google is hosting a virus or is it the obvious censorship that has got much worse of the past 6 months.

Twitter has become like the Mafia and if you pay them money then they will deal with any negative PR and if you don't then you are fair game and trying to over promote your site without paying Twitter money will soon get your site black listed and you an email from Twitter offering to help to promote any genuine sites ??????? like screw you

I just did a Bing to see if I could find any blogs where anyone was saying the same as me and I got to page 4 before giving in because all the results were the same about Twitter censoring tweets based on certain countries so am I the only person in the world that saying Twitter is censoring tweets not on just what contry the tweet can be viewd in but right across the board or is it like I keep saying that these search engines are distoring the truth, hiding most of the web well out of view and don't ask me why microsofts bing would try to protect twitter because I don't know apart from MS having the NSA as a paymaster just like all the other big, all american software corporations because no one else can code or is it that no one can compete in a closed circuit NSA fixed system.

a reply to: PhysicsAlive
Are you sure ( have proof) of a manual Google action against your webpage?

As a website owner (multiple domains) and software developer myself I noticed something else that might explain why your page went to page x after a few weeks. My pages were on page 1 at the top right at the start. My domain name is also unique and the name used couldn't be found somewhere else. So of cause I'm top of the list.

But after this my name spread in the net. People start talking about you. Your unique name starts popping up in all the board, newspapers and so on. And this is a problem: These pages/domains (like ATS) have a much higher internal ranking than your own page at this time. So these other pages will show up in the list and your page will drop back to page 10 for a few weeks. I had to wait for Google to recalculate my ranking. The more of theses other pages link to your your ranking will rise and thus your pages will make it to page 1 again after a few weeks. It even might help to promote your page in other board (if allowed there) or get some blog/newspapers to write about your page with a link.

And it's often not a good idea to use hidden descriptions or search words embedded in your pages. And never use multiple domains to create circle links from one of your page to another beside those 1 or 2 needed on your 'my other projects' page. If you use to much of these all the search engines will rank your page as suspected SEO and downgrade your page. But this will be automated to remove unfair webpages from the result page.

a reply to: UnixFE

The whole of the internet is now at the mercy of Google, no compertion and the bigest monoply in the world so just where are the regulators ?

Google was the best thing since sliced bread at one stage, free canndy, come and get your canndy but now we have addicts the canndy is no longer free and we now tell you how to build HTML pages, what hidden tags you need and forget w3c or doing as we do, just do as we say, embed our scripts, link to our other spyware freinds, don't say what we don't like.

its not a technical isue about bots indexing pages and SEO that changes from week to week but about big money and censorship and the level playing field we once had has long since gone and thats from someone who was doing ajax in netscape navigator 4.2 before it even had a name and when the only thing dynamic about the browser was you could change the content of a textbox but not a table cell.

IE3 at the time had this lovly thing called VBScript but may it rest in peace along with that blink tag everyone got tired with.

When I was first interested in SEO, I tried every technique I could find online on my website and studied high ranking webpages very closely.

At first, because I was obsessing about my website ranking, I used some keyword spamming techniques and got dropped entirely from Google unless you searched the URL. An oops! moment that got me researching the limits of SEO techniques and got me to develop a method that complied with limitations of the big three search engines. After a couple of months, Google put my website back up and I played with the limits a little and eventually I think I got the best ranking possible given the T&C of the almighty Google.

You have to walk a tight rope and continue to research search engine ranking methods because they often change. At first the meta keywords were really important, then text had more weight, then links to the site, now I'm not sure how ranking is determined, it's probably a combination of everything up to now plus new things.

Interesting thing about your case is that it seems personally directed to your website like it was really bad, like kiddie porn or something. I would suspect that Google can screw you on ranking for any reason, or none at all, without needing to give any explanation.

originally posted by: PhysicsAlive
a reply to: Krazysh0t

lol! I guess I'm a bit of a moron sometimes

Seriously though, they don't make it very obvious in their webmaster tools pages, or other areas of the site, as to how to contact them.

No prob. I know it's kind of against the spirit of the thread, but I googled it.

The reason I haven't contacted them yet is not that I don't know how to contact them but rather that we are trying to figure out what exactly to say to them, and whether or not we should make some changes to the site to address things we think might have triggered a flag for them *before* contacting them. If we make these site changes, it might negatively impact our SEO with Bing, and cause some other problems, and also it is a bunch of work. I really hate doing throwaway work, and so I'm torn about whether to contact them right away, or to make the changes first, considering I'm not even sure making these changes will help.

I'll figure out these problems and make a decision eventually. But, my feeling right now is that there isn't a huge rush and that I should do things very deliberately and carefully.

Well that's the thing, it's JUST a phone call. You don't have to commit to anything. You just call, ask them what's up, and what needs to be done. That way you know EXACTLY where Google stands on your issue. It could be good information to have, they are a quite powerful company, assumptions could hurt more than you know.

a reply to: MichiganSwampBuck

You have to walk a tight rope and continue to research search engine ranking methods because they often change.

Yep it becomes black magic but even if you get the page to near perfection then unless you are paying google then you still end up on the middle pages even with google spy scripts all over the page and say something that Google and it's NWO friends don't like and you are on page 99+ regardless of any SEO on the page.

I send Google random search terms and log the results and its always the same 1000-2000 sites that ever get near the front pages and the data does not lie with of course wikipedia as number one.

Some sites get new pages on Google within the hour and yet others are told they need to wait weeks and you can replicate the meta-tags all you like, it will never happen for me or you.

a reply to: PhysicsAlive

I do wish you luck. I tried setting up a couple of friends with their websites, and explained the thing about placement with Google in searches. To make a small point, I wrote an article on Google Blooger and the next day, their comps were 1st or 2nd or so pg 1. It was short lived though. They both are the types who believed the notion of "build it and they will come". Then they found out it is a daily thing to maintain, monies for services and everything else that goes with having a site.

Once they understood somebody has to do it...and your ranking in and out of Google and others isnt really determined so much by a sites efforts...both sites folded. (As most startups do).

Sir, I dont have 1/10 the knowledge you express and have exhibited here, so if you cant get through the "Google Swamp" of preferential treatment....no one can. And thats a shame. I know how hard and long it took you to get these going because I did it too...and it all went down the drain after I got them in the search engines.

Within 1 week or less...they didnt even show up in a simple search. Needless to say, I dont offer much to help someone now who asks...maybe write or re-edit some of their texts...but thats it. And with all youve gone through...I really dont think its in my best interests to do anymore anytime soon for anyone.

Good luck to you...and I hope youll keep us posted. I'd like to follow your trials and tribulations! Thanks and Best....MS

Another thing to be aware of is malicious Negative SEO ... the search engines don't like to admit it's possible, but if a competitor has it in for you it is possible to negatively impact your site by doing all those bad blog commenting, garbage linking tricks, spamming, etc that you would never do yourself because it would get you penalized. Watch for your site's content being duplicated on bad domains. Watch your backlinks and watch the keywords that do bring you search traffic. If you see garbage links piling up that you didn't create, or your site popping up for soft porn keywords, someone might be messing with you.

I would have to agree with another poster tho .. if your site is only a few months old you could just be experiencing the Sandbox. Hopefully with time it will release you.

a reply to: mysterioustranger

Thanks for your kind words mysterious. I still think that some sites can have great success with organic Google SEO but depending on the nature of your site, and other various factors, at the very best it is a crapshoot. And not with very good odds.

Google used to have a motto - "Don't be evil". I think they have jumped the shark on this. They now seem to have no care at all for small business owners and startups that are trying to promote their site, unless you pay for an expensive AdWords campaign. This completely goes against their original motto. And it's obvious that their motive for this is just to increase their revenues from Google AdWords. Why would they want to make organic Google search work well for a new site, if they make extra money when organic search *doesn't* work and it forces a small business or startup to pay for an AdWords campaign in order to survive? They have a serious conflict of interest here.

I actually would like to see a study of how the US economy has suffered (in terms of stock prices suffering, etc) as a function of when Google has rolled out new algorithms (i.e. Panda, and who knows what else). I imagine many small businesses went under because their organic search traffic went to $%!& as a result of wave after wave of new, and more aggressive policies/algorithms making organic search less effective. Perhaps Google is to blame for the economic quagmire we are in right now, as there is a major ripple effect through the larger economy if small businesses can't survive based on getting new customers through a website. And most small businesses don't have the tech know-how to navigate through these crazy choppy waters, and might not even know what happened at all when they suddenly have way fewer inquiries for their services.

The feds seriously need to crack down on Google and take them to court for monopolistic practices, IMHO. They are going to destroy our great nation, just to get their stock price to soar to even more ridiculous levels. When their market cap goes up like this, where is this money coming from? They are a Vampire that is draining blood from the bread & butter entrepreneurs that make this country (I mean the USA) great, and destroying the American Dream.

I never meant to sound arrogant about my background as a software engineer, etc, I just wanted to give that info as it is the truth. I don't have a huge ego around it or anything, it's just what I do. I have pride in my work. If someone like me is now disillusioned about innovating new tech projects because I'm worried about having problems with Google giving me fair rankings in search results, what effect does this have on innovation in general?

In any case, I've now switched to using Firefox instead of Chrome, and I'm boycotting Google search and using Bing instead. I actually hadn't ever used Bing as I ignorantly loved Google before all of this happened. But, Bing seems to work quite well for search and in fact (not surprisingly) I'm seeing many search results for sites that I never saw in Google searches.

Of course, M$FT runs Bing and they have their own unique evilness... But that's another topic LOL!

a reply to: PhysicsAlive

reviving this old dead thread because the topic came up with some friends of mine today, i wanted to ask you if you ever managed to get in contact with google and get this all sorted out?