3 Month Google Penalty for Selling Text Links Lifted

I’ve been an SEO consultant for years and own over 100 domains and through SEO testing have had at least 20 domains banned/penalised in Google, (I expected many of them to be banned since was testing SEO limits) so have a lot of experience with Google penalties.

About 5 months ago I started selling text links from my Free Recipe site (used one of the text link seller sites) and after a lot of technical problems finally got the entire web site added to their text link inventory, that was 50,000 pages available for selling text links from. I expected overtime to make a fair bit of extra cash from selling text links, apparently averages about $5 per link for a site like that one, so with 50,000 pages to link from there’s the potential for a lot of money without having to do any work (my preferred way of making money ).

On September the 4th 2008 the traffic to the site dropped from over 10,000 visitors a day (looked like the daily amount was passing 12,000 visitors) to less than 2,000 and had remained that low until today!

This was a growing site, over the proceeding 6 months it had gone from 11,000 recipes to 36,000 (took the site to about 8K visitors a day) and had recently (few weeks earlier) broken the 50,000 recipe mark (that’s when I sold my first link from the site) and was easily breaking 10,000 visitors a day with the majority of the traffic from Google.

A week before the drop in traffic I’d added another 10,000 recipes (working on 100,000 recipes in total) and it looked like just before the Google penalty the site was passing 12,000 visitors a day with about 10K from Google SERPS. So this was a growing site content and traffic wise and Google loved it which meant the traffic drop had to be a Google penalty.

At the time I’d sold a massive two text links from the site making less than $10!!!!

Since there was nothing else obviously wrong with the recipe site I believe the penalty was due to the text links (you can never be 100% certain, but I’m very confident it was the links for this penalty): this strongly suggests Google either automatically or via their employees are checking the text link selling sites and acting accordingly, with 50,000 pages in their inventory wasn’t hard for them to find that site**! I find it hard to believe they’d catch the site as a seller of links from two links on two deep pages of a 50,000+ page website.

** All a Google employee would have to do is sign up as an advertiser of these text link seller websites and search through their inventory for links. Advertisers don’t even have to pay for a link to see the URL, so a Google employee could find hundreds of sites selling links without even having to buy a link.

Within a week or so of being sure it was a penalty (I had server problems the week before just to muddy the water!) I’d got the site removed from the text link sellers site and had put in a re-inclusion request via Google’s Webmaster tools admitting to selling links and explaining the text links had been removed and the entire site removed from the text link sellers inventory. Basically the site would never be used to sell text links again.

You normally don’t get a response to a Google re-inclusion requests and to date not had one. Basically if the re-inclusion request works your site will start ranking again, if not you can only assume they either haven’t got to your re-inclusion request yet or they still think the site deserves a penalty..

From experience I know if you make a SEO mistake like this and come clean in the re-inclusion request as long as you’ve removed the offending problem Google should reinstate the site eventually (can take months, which is fair enough). 2+ months on and I was getting worried it was a permanent penalty which would SUCK!!!

My First Google Penalty/Ban

My very first website was a lingerie/sex toys site, this was for my very first online business and it’s the site I used to learn SEO with. Despite it being a framed site with dynamic URLs at a time search engines handled them poorly and more javascript than HTML coding! I did so well with the site that without having to use PPC traffic I sold over £80,000 worth of lingerie in one year (I realised then how good I was at SEO and it was far more interesting/challenging than selling adult stuff). I got the 1,000 product site ranked high in Google (top 5 for the Lingerie SERP at one point for example) through a combination of on page SEO and some blackhat linking practices, blog comment link spamming and this got the site about 8,000 visitors a day!

In hindsight without the blackhat SEO techniques I think I’d have got the site to around 5,000 visitors a day within the same period of time, but long term pass 8,000 visitors a day.

I made a blackhat SEO mistake and admit it, the site deserved a Google ban. In my defence I needed the site to do well as it was my only source of income at the time! A few years earlier I’d had to drop out of University on medical grounds and had been claiming benefits on medical grounds (was very poor with a wife and 3 young children). After realising my back pain was not going to be cured quickly I gave up on my career plans (could have finished my degree quite easily, guess I still could) to be a research geneticist (planned to work on something like curing/controlling HIV/AIDS) and my life went from working towards a career that excited me to just making money to make ends meet.

I had and still have no interest in lingerie/sex toys, through research I found there was a big market for that type of product and the markup was amazing! I can not fault Google for banning the lingerie site permanently since I’d made a big SEO mistake and unlike with selling text links there’s no way to remove comment spammed links, so unfortunately that site will probably be always banned in Google!

Interestingly and fortunately I’d realised a few months before that ban that what I’d done could damage the site permanently and so I put a new business plan into action and setup a SEO business. One month before I was ready to offer paid SEO services the site was hit with a disastrous Google penalty (from 8,000 to 1,000 visitors a day!). After a few months of trying to keep the lingerie site running on about 10% of the traffic whilst building up my SEO business I was able to put the lingerie site into moth balls and concentrate 100% of my time into SEO services. I wasn’t upset about this at all, (I didn’t enjoy selling those products) within a few months of the penalty I was making more from offering SEO services than from the lingerie site at it’s peak.

Strangely enough for as long as I’ve been making money on the Internet I’ve always landed on my feet so to speak when something goes wrong. I’ve lost clients who pay over £1,000 a month only to get a new client days later paying £1,500 a month. It’s weird, it’s almost like every time something goes wrong something even better happens a short time later. It’s like the AdSense money lost from the recipe site, I probably lost $500 a month due to the traffic drop, but gained over $1,000 a month from promoting a new Clickbank product

Looks like I just lost some Clickbank traffic (sales down) last week and now the recipe site is recovering

Anyway, back to my recipe sites Google penalty. Over the last month traffic has been stable at around 1,200 visitors a day.

Today is December 4th 2008 and I’m already at 5,600 visitors and looking at relevant SERPs many have recovered, wahoo, looks like the penalty has been lifted, thank you Google

Mental note to self: stop taking risks on important websites, it’s STUPID!!!

3 Month Google Penalty

I find it hard to believe a penalty would start and stop on the 4th of the month by coincidence, so looks like the site had a 3 calendar month Google penalty.

I’ve heard others say they’ve had penalties around 3 months, but this is the first time for me to be sure it’s exactly 3 calendar months to the day.

As long as it’s not a coincidence this strongly suggests an automated penalty, basically Google found a problem with the site and penalised it on the 4th September. Exactly 3 calendar months later a bot or something rechecked the site found the problem fixed and removed the penalty.

I’m 99% sure this penalty was for the text links, which if I’m right begs the question how would Google automatically find sites selling text links? I can see how they would do it manually, but not automated.

I knew Google doesn’t like sites selling text links, but believed as long as your not stupid nothing bad would happen. The program I used for selling links involved a WordPress plugin, but you get to name the plugin file anything you like (I didn’t use anything obvious) and so there should be no way for a bot to find the plugin (there’s nothing in the end HTML that would give it away)!

Will update this post in a few days, hoping the site fully recovers and it can again break the 10,000 visitors a day mark. As it was going the first few days in September I could be in for over 15,000 visitors a day and if it’s recovered I’ll continue to add more recipes until I break that 100,000 recipes mark.

Wish me luck.

David Law