Hit by the Dreaded Google Penalty

Just when I thought it couldn't happen, my main site Celtnet has been hit by the dreaded 'Google Penalty'.

If you don't know about it this is when your site's search results begin falling down and down the results until they're all below entry 200 or less. It's taken me over 3 years to build the site and at the beginning of last year 2008 I started to make a breakthrough, adding links and content every day. This success impelled me to build the Celtnet Recipes region of the site to over 6500 recipes; each unique and hand crafted by me.

The success snowballed so, but January 2009 I was getting over 15000 hits daily and I was making a decent income from AdSense. This is Google's own advertising program. Then, last Friday (February 6th) my traffic suddenly dried up. Over the next two days I dropped down to only 4000 hits per day, basically just those people who have bookmarked my site and income dropped by over 2/3.

OK, Google only does this when people have violated their terms of service and it's probably an automatic flag set in their system somewhere. This, though would be easier to swallow if I had changed my code and the way the site works in some way... But I haven't.

So I can't, personally, explain this drop in SERPs (serge engine page rankings) position. And that's the thing... OK, if I've violated Google's TOS then this some kind of penalty is fair. But I'm just one guy trying to put good content and new content on the web... I'm not an SEO expert and I don't have a team of people behind me.

The only way to get page rankings back is to use google's 'reinclusion submission' form. But this form assumes you know what went wrong and that you've fixed it and then you confess to them what you did and why and then you say you will never do it again. But I haven't got a clue!!!

And this is where it really gets unfair. Google hit you with a penalty over-night and don't tell you why. So if you've unintentionally done something wrong you have no clue as to why they penalized you and what you did wrong because they did not tell you! So I now have to try and figure out what I might have done wrong so that I can fix it then tell them 'I'm sorry' and 'I won't do it again'.

My income dropped dramatically during these days and is continually dropping. Now, I could blame myself and say it's my fault... except that my income from the website isn't going to me.... I'm actually using it to fund the education of Liberian refugee children in Dakar, Senegal (see One Million People Campaign Pages to see why. So this drop in SERPs for my site isn't hitting me, it's hitting others.

I work damn hard on my website, over 50 hours per week (and I have a regular job). I try and do my best, I make certain my content is novel and good...

But if I can't figure out what went wrong, and with no help from Google, in the next few weeks then I'm going to give up.

Google say they want good content on the web, but this really isn't helping. There are plenty of spammy sites out there and mine isn't one. I have unique content not crap! So why has my site vanished and now sites with far less content than mine are the only one users see.

If Google is really true in what they say about good user experiences then this is not the way to go. I'm fed up and rather than dealing with any of this nonesense again I'm going to give up and get a second job to help those Liberian kids. I've just lost them over $800 a month and to them and their future and there must be better ways of earning the money than this.

If Google are just going to pull the rug from under your feet without telling you why and giving you a chance to fix it (after all, it's only fair to be warned if your income is about to be wiped out) then why should the little guys doing individual things and actually adding to the web experience bother?

It's not the penalty that gets me... If I did something wrong then a penalty is warranted. It's just that there was no warning, no information is forthcoming and no grace period was given to fix things.

Google's motto is 'don't be evil'... But how is this not evil in any way? I've been royally screwed by Google. But, unfortunately, in the end I'm not the one who is going to suffer. I might actually get the time I spend on the website I've created from nothing all by myself back.

My website was a labour of love and this is just the way to completely kill my spirit.