Blacklist in Google search results can kill your site
April 18, 2008
Just how powerful is Google in delivering traffic to a website?
Very powerful, no doubt — and car insurance comparison site GoCompare.com learned this the hard way.
Back in January 2008, GoCompare.com ranked #1 in the Google search results for the competitive keywords “car insurance“. In fact, during the first 4 weeks of 2008, 15% of the total traffic to the site was delivered by the search engine through those keywords.
But before January ended, Google discovered that the website engaged in “irregular linking activity” and decided to slap GoCompare.com with a penalty. From its enviable #1 ranking, the website dropped to page 7 of the search results listing.
The ensuing impact proved detrimental. Traffic from Google severely declined and during the week ending February 9, GoCompare.com received only 2.31% of all search term traffic from the keywords “car insurance”.
The graph below from online metrics company Hitwise details the impact of the blacklist. Notice the sharp decline of traffic right after Google penalized the website.
Traffic to GoCompare.com from the search term “car insurance” before and after the Google blacklist
Worse, its two competitors are now battling for the top spot of the search results and both are currently enjoying the traffic that previously went to GoCompare.com. The site now spends a lot of money for paid clicks to get more traffic and is just hoping it can someday regain the top spot again.
The impact of traffic from Google search results were noted before by some Filipino bloggers. Dexter previously wrote about the increased traffic to his site (and increased income!) due to the prime position of his blog in the keywords “Manny vs Barrera fight result”. Marhgil panicked when his traffic dropped after Google supposedly moved his blog posts away from the first page of the results. Fortunately, that was just a glitch and the traffic went back to normal after a few days.
Lesson of the day: make sure you don’t piss Google off because if they penalized and blacklisted you in the search results, that can mean the end for your site.
April 18th, 2008 at %H:%M
Google off because if they penalized and blacklisted you in the search results, that can mean the end for your site.
only john chow said thta it is not
April 18th, 2008 at %H:%M
I don’t know James.
With Google’s long-standing policy of doing no manual editing of the search engine result, their bias (pagerank) and their constant algorithm change, I doubt it that the majority of those who are penalized will be penalized for that long. Plus the reinclusion technique is now widespread.
I have witnessed websites disappear from serps only to return a few weeks or a few months later. Wacking the mole manually has never been Google policy. They will change the algorithm to lower the authority of certain external links. The reason for this is there are millions of websites to track down, so they selectively prioritize on who to penalize through programming. This results of this is many slip to the crack.
To illustrate my point, I have look the at the result of car insurance, in various google data center. Guess what? GoCompare.com is in 1st and 2nd page of Google serps.
I have also observed that Yahoo Search is getting better and better year after year at providing traffic. Perhaps we will soon a level playing field with this two search giants in the near future.
April 18th, 2008 at %H:%M
yeah, it can kill your site if you depend heavily on them for traffic. networking with other bloggers, having lots of RSS readers and being extraordinarily famous can help your blog survive in case of a Google slap. I think that saved John Chow’s blog from dying when Google slap his blog. :)
April 18th, 2008 at %H:%M
Marhgil is correct to say that having other sources of traffic besides Google is a way to save a site that was penalized by Google. But I think even John Chow would agree that it would still be better if his site was on the search results.
The lesson here is perhaps to make sure that Google does not ban your site and, at the same time, to prepare in case Google slaps your site with a penalty. In that case, you really have to have lots of linkbacks. And also it won’t hurt to become “extraordinarily famous” so as to make people remember your site without them having to search for the URL in Google.
Michael, I agree, but still in the short-term it is costly for a website if it is nowhere to be found in the Google SERPs. The same Hitwise report in the article above mentioned that GoCompare had to increase their advertising costs just to be able to rank higher again for the “car insurance” keywords. They didn’t have to spend a lot when they were occupying the top spot in the SERPs.
Yahoo indeed is eating more and more market shares from Google, albeit slowly. I also noticed that my site ranks higher in Yahoo for certain keywords rather in Google. It is very competitive to rank high in Google, but in Yahoo, even if I don’t do a lot of optimization, the pages of the site still rank higher. Now if only more people will use Yahoo Search, then more traffic will come to the site hehe.
April 18th, 2008 at %H:%M
James, Yes, I agree with you that yahoo is slowly eating some of the chunks that Google dominate for some time… My site also rank higher on Yahoo than that of Google search engine pages… Though i know that my site is not that famous… My traffic comes mostly from my Blogroll… and the site i visited and commented on…