March 19, 2012

Most website owners are familiar with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, which lists both acceptable site promotion methods (termed “white hat” and including such thing as promoting valuable content and seeking links from high quality sites) and techniques that don’t pass muster. These “black hat” methods include more nefarious activities, including buying links, scraping content and otherwise attempting to “game” the search engines in exchange for higher rankings.

The idea behind these regulations is that sites that operate in an ethical way by providing value to their visitors should naturally outrank spammers in the search results pages. Even Matt Cutts – Google’s notorious spokesman – confirms this, stating in a video on the Google Webmasters’ Central Youtube channel:

“Even if you do brain-dead stupid things and shoot yourself in the foot, but have good content, we still want to return it.”

Small time blogger Pawel Reszka, who shares high quality information on how to make money online on his AffHelper.com website, found out the hard way. "I do not believe that the company’s motto – 'Do no evil' – is being upheld in the way it tracks website rankings and issues penalties," he says.

"In building my site, I have followed all of Google’s guidelines. I published valuable, informative content and sought natural links to my website using methods long approved by Google. And yet, despite following the Webmaster Guidelines, I received the dreaded 'message of death' from Google, indicating that my blog was being penalized for unnatural links."

So what sank his site? Reszka believes it was probably the actions of a competitor that caused his site to be penalized – something Google says shouldn’t be able to happen.

According to the Google Webmaster Help forum, Google has gone on the record as saying: “There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.”

"However, based on the penalties I've experienced, this 'almost nothing' is quite a bit more widespread than the search giant would like to let on," Reszka says.

In his “tell all” post on the subject, Pawel Reszka shares more information on the suspected actions that led to this penalty, as well as additional evidence on how Google’s tactics goes far beyond simply penalizing one “small time” blogger.

For more information on both Reszka’s penalty read his full post at:
http://www.affhelper.com/googles-hypocrisy-exposed//