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.

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.

only john chow said thta it is not