The reviews I posted were as white hat and legit as it could get. I used the products in depth, gave my honest feedback, and posted the results in highly informative articles.

The site is perfectly SEO optimized, transparent, and contains all of the necessary things like the About Us and Contact pages. Fuck, I even put an XML sitemap.

In fact, when I made this site, the main goal was to provide EXCELLENT information for the visitors (wow, people still do that?)

I submitted my URL for crawling, then started an AdWords campaign following the advice gained from 3 adwords books and the plethora of link spam on the Adwords help forums.

The next day I noticed Google sent me 96 uniques organically, and several clicks. I was in business, or so I thought.

That afternoon, I was slapped to 1/10 on 60 keywords. All keywords were in 9 tightly knit ad groups sent to excellent content pages. I was sitting at 1/10 with Landing Page: no problems, Keyword Relevance: no problems, Loading Time: no problems. Nice job!

Since the slap, I haven’t received a single organic click through and cannot for the life of me revive my QS.

First off let me say that I completely agree with the need to implement a system to weed out dishonest players.

Next, let me say that I think it’s absolutely fucking appalling that people are losing their asses because an algorithm says they should.

I think in Google’s venture to make the internet a more welcoming, relevant place, they’ve also managed to give momentum to problems that will come back to haunt them in days to come.

Antitrust issues are barking at their door, not only here in the states, but also in Europe.

Bottom line is that you cannot own 90% of the internet search market share and behave this recklessly toward a portion of the minority who help pay your bills. The anti-Google sentiment will snowball, trust me.

The action they took to “clean up the internet” will only make them look good for so long. Eventually, people will see them as the vultures they are.

They should have warned EVERYONE and told the people that if they were caught breaking TOS that they would
THEN be permanently banned. But to just ban people without even a warning is ridiculous.

Now onto the controversial part of my comments. Google had to do something…they just did it with a nuclear bomb instead of a firecracker. The B.S. that advertisers were doing on Google just got out of control. Totally out of control.

You could NOT get a decent review on any product in the last two years because of all the fake blogs. Searches to find products was becoming a joke. There were so many junk and outright scam sites it became ridiculous.

In fact I belong to a PPC coaching site where they still teach tactics that they KNOW is against Googles TOS. And these “coaches” have the nerve to bitch and moan and groan.

While I think Google needs to be bitch slapped themselves there are a lot of gurus (most of them phony)and coaching sites that have nothing but themselves to blame.

Todd

Like Ad Hustler said, DIVERSIFY!