I am in Google Update Hell. Well, Google Hell at least. I am starting to think that Matt Cutts and the boys at Google are targeting me personally.
Not really, but man. This has been a crazy-bad year from a Google standpoint.
First, my AdWords account gets banned for a reason that I understand, but it seemed completely unfair to me. No big deal, since I don’t use AdWords much. But still, ouch.
Then, my AdSense account gets banned for absolutely no reason. I am a model advertiser when it come to Google. Still, they banned it with no reasonable explanation. Turns out that Jon Leger was absolutely right when he said:
Google doesn’t care about your business. Repeat that with me: Google doesn’t care about your business.
Note that Jon was talking about search traffic, but I think he has it right in general.
Most recently, my Corn Sheller site (the one I talked about over the past few months on the Podcast) got hit by the latest google update. Now this is a great site, with great information about Corn Shellers. The problem is that the link profile is not natural — it was ranking because of links from Blog Networks only, and the anchor text was not varied (two big problems given recent updates). Here is the impact that Google updates have had on traffic.
I’m not whining. This is all part of the deal. I did not use my normal process to build this site — it was just a quick and dirty test to show the power of KeyWord Canine (which is awesome, by the way). Still, the site was making more than a dollar per day with no work. That is pretty cool, and I hate to see Google hammering it.
We’ll discuss this more on the next podcast episode. Until then….
