Because they were crap.

What Google is doing is penalizing crap and spammy sites. Yes, yours can get included accidentally, which after reading Google’s forums many have had this happen. But in the case of valid sites, within a few days they were back up.  One of the problems is that many people saw an easy way to make money by scamming others. There’s no integrity involved or transparency for that matter in these scenarios. Just plow into one of those sites and you’ll see the problem. Many people have been trying to find a “push-button” way to make money on the Internet and use all kinds of questionable means to do so. Frankly — what they need to do is get off their duffs, start working and quit scamming people.

I’ve never really worried about any of my sites because I do all the writing for them (except for this one — I imported content over the  pages I already had that I created originally). That and the bad links got me a penalty with Google. They were right to do so. When I started this site, I was new to Internet Marketing. I didn’t know then what I know now nearly five years later. I still believe that if you find your passion and follow through with it, keep original content on your site (you can check it here: copyscape.com) and double check that you haven’t accidentally pulled content from elsewhere, you’ll be fine. As a former journalist, if you’re going to pull content, make sure you put the content into quotes so that it is recognized as not coming from you. Always quote the original contributor to keep your copy clean.

With original content, honest-to-goodness links from other sites that pick up an article of yours in syndication, and no behind-the-scenes trying to climb up in the rankings “illegally,” Google will  not have a problem with your site. I don’t blame Google for penalizing sites that are trying to increase their page rank by nefarious means. My mistake is that I thought I’d be adding valuable content, only to find that many of these articles linked to bad sites (I took some bad advice with the auto blogging feature).

You can also be penalized even though your content is fine when your site links to a site that Google deems questionable. When I went through my links (and it’s my fault I ignored these for a while), out of 7 pages, 4 of them were filled with links to 404 pages, link farms or the website had been taken down already. To the Googlebot, this is indeed suspicious looking.

You can resubmit your site to Google when you remove all the crap — and they will look it over for re-indexing.  Anything that looks suspicious, remove it. This includes comments from  spammers. Install a plug-in to your site to catch spammers and don’t approve comments from those who are just trying to ride on the back of your website. Honest-to-goodness real live comments or links from reputable sites will never be a problem with Google.

Basically it’s time to clean house — and everyone should be paying attention. No more “fast buck” attempts to falsely generate traffic. Really, really pay attention to your links and review the “Quality” terms and conditions Google has — yes it may be a giant — and yes it is controlling things to a certain degree, but the Google network is its own. If you find you don’t get the rankings you want, take a good look at your site and get rid of questionable material.

Here’s what Google says on link schemes:

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

I don’t think this is unreasonable. When I reviewed the 7 pages of links  and a full page that had yet to be approved — I found many of them no longer linked to a website. While someone may have posted an article I wrote a while back — during the time my site has been up for a while now, they let their domain expire. This leaves a lot of 404 pages — and to the Googlebot, it may look scammy. Get rid of any links that are broken and are not from reputable sites.

Make sure you use original content and you provide value to those looking for information.

Quality first, always.

Here’s what Google has to say about quality and content:

• Thin affiliate sites: These sites collect pay-per-click (PPC) revenue by sending visitors to the sites of affiliate programs, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user. These sites usually have no original content and may be cookie-cutter sites or templates with no unique content.
• Doorway pages: Pages created just for search engines
• Auto-generated content: Content generated programatically. Often this will consist of random paragraphs of text that make no sense to the reader but that may contain search keywords.
• Scraped content: Some webmasters make use of content taken from other, more reputable sites on the assumption that increasing the volume of web pages with random, irrelevant content is a good long-term strategy. Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not provide any added value to your users without additional useful services or content provided by your site. It’s worthwhile to take the time to create original content that sets your site apart. This will keep your visitors coming back and will provide useful search results.

I can’t argue with any of that — can you?

After all, if we provide valuable content, and Google has gotten rid of or de-indexed crap, it makes it that much easier for your site to be found. And do remember this: Google is only ONE search engine, yes the biggest, but there are others that provide traffic to your site.

Avoid auto blogging or content scraping, link schemes and more and you should be ok.

Remember to keep a positive attitude and keep your website’s nose clean and all should be well in Google-land.

It’s  the science of how you make your articles, your websites and design, and your affiliate marketing efforts get good placement in searches online for your potential market.

It’s the science behind getting good website and article placement in the search engines.  It’s all about the “how” of getting your material found and read.

There’s still a lot of smoke and mirrors with search engine optimization and it involves many things:

• Keywords
• Article crafting
• Keyword density
• For websites, headline sizes, internal links, meta tags, image tags
• The ease in which your websites can be indexed by a search engine
• and much, much more.

The whole idea behind search engine optimization is to “optimize” your articles and your websites be they free or wholly owned by you, to be picked up by the search engines and displayed in the top rankings of search results for the select keywords you are using AND the market you are targeting.

This is how you can get good traffic.

But there are tricks involved.  And the tricks involve picking the right keywords.  That is a science unto itself.

Once you understand the “how” of it, you’re unstoppable.

Use your keywords in the title of your article, in the first paragraph of your title, in your image captions, and be sure to bold it somewhere along the way.