A photo pillow of my son Channing, now 11
On my home page you’ll always see a link to Portrait Quilts, my sister’s web site where for several years she has sold quilts, pillows, and tote bags printed with customer photographs. This is how she makes her living, selling on the web and through photo stores. Buy one, please. Or if you are a quilter she’ll print your photos on cloth so you can quilt them yourself.
Then approximately three months ago Google decided that Portrait Quilts does not exist.
You can find a Google listing for portraitquilts.com, if you search for that specific string, but if you look for photo quilts or any similar search term, Portrait Quilts — which for years was always the top result — no longer appears. My sister’s web traffic and her income were instantly and dramatically reduced for her biggest season of the year, Christmas.
I’m her big brother and feel protective but I didn’t know about it until this week when I came for a visit. You see in addition to making quilts day and night my sister has been caring for our 89 year-old mother who was just diagnosed with a particularly nasty kind of cancer. Mom begins chemotherapy on Thursday. Pray for her.
To whom do you complain at Google, a company that prefers machine-to-machine communication? Nobody, it seems, because my sister has tried. You’d think if they were going to claim 70 percent of America’s search traffic they’d at least do it fairly, but no. Nobody at Google will respond.
There are plenty of search engine optimization companies that will take my sister’s money and pretend to do something about this problem, but when you press them to explain their techniques it always comes down to bullshit.
No search engine optimization company can make Google index something Google doesn’t want to index.
She could always buy traffic with Google AdWords, but wouldn’t that be extortion? I mean there simply aren’t that many photo quilt companies on the Internet and for a big one to disappear entirely from Google and have to buy its way back on, well that sure sounds like a racket to me.
But wait, there’s more!
My little sister is not without friends. She is, in fact, quite well known in the computer, software, and Internet industries and not for her quilts or for being my little sister. She founded PC Data, the largest PC market research firm, now part of the NPD Group. My little sister knows people who know people.
One of those people is the former CEO of a large software company who offered to take her complaint to his buddy Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google.
Eric Schmidt said he was sorry but he couldn’t help.
Now I’m angry.
If you are an Internet entrepreneur who has been similarly dissed by Google, let me know. If you found a way to resolve a similar problem, let me know. If you are one of the hundreds of Googlers who read this column, tell me how to fix this.
Because up until a couple months ago this looked like it was going to be a blockbuster Christmas for Portrait Quilts. Not anymore.
This is why I never use nonessential Google services, for example G+, Adwords, or paid Play Store purchases. I’ve heard too many stories about people who managed to piss off Google, and their businesses disappeared, or their Androids just stopped working, and there’s no appeal, customer service, or recourse.
.
The same, of course, applies to my relations with Microsoft (You want me to buy an Xbox?? Or use any non-monopoly MS product??)
Please name one essential Google service…
Search.
/thread
If I may re-word @You Must Be Also’s question:
“Name one esential Google service for which there doesn’t also exist about a dozen competing services that could step in and fulfill the same need if Google was to disappear tomorrow”…..
At Microsoft, and Bing specifically, I think we take human-human interaction very seriously. If you sent our webmaster team an email asking why your site wasn’t indexed, we would read it. Someone on my team would check to see what the problem was, fix it, and report back. That’s what we do, and we take pride in providing this level of personal service.
Speaking of, I went and did a similar search on Bing, and wouldn’t you know it, but the business was listed as the first link there.
jesus, Bing. I spend thousands a month on google and your adwords are complete garbage. Your tech support is second tier. For all the problems Google has, you have ten times them. Kiss my ass.
If you spend “thousands a month on google” why criticize Bing? Typo somewhere?
No typo. I spend thousands on Google and get great results. But it’s also important to be organic. w/e.
But every time I use Bing it’s a disaster. Scammy results, bad partner network, horrible google import. yuck.
Heard this story a bunch. There’s no solace in Etsy-type lands where similar favoritism and pay for play seems to be escalating (either de facto through corruption/abuse of services or through outright policy). The big emergent walled gardens of course won’t be concerned with the “small fries” out there, insisting they pay for play, too. Amazon is similarly troubled, I know from a couple customers with not dissimilar issues, the problem is endemic. “If you’re not big enough, screw you.”
–
Not sure why the surprise or anger re Schmidt at this point, this is Google’s modus operandi for years now. Although they may be able to manually “fix” it here and there,given their goal is total automation it’s rather nonsensical for Schmidt to do anything for a microbusiness or personal site.
–
There’s a reason Adam Smith himself saw monopolization as a huge threat to the free market and advocated government action to protect against it. We ignore this at our own hazard.
I could be mistaken, but I don’t believe that Adam Smith said that. I that that what he said was that government should refrain from granting monopolies. I don’t think the idea of government going out to break up monopolies Teddy Roosevelt-style had much, if any, currency in Smith’s time.
Bruce:
Exactly. You will note that Google is _not_ a monopoly as only the government can create a true one. I also switched to DuckDuckGo and encourage everyone else to do likewise.
Perhaps a major paper or news show will pick up on this kind of story.
Interestingly, portraitquilts.com comes up (second) on duckduckgo.com.
It shows up on Google search as the 132nd result, on page 14 of the search results!
My new company http://www.impactchallenges.com has been up for a couple of months. There’s more than 1,000 unique views, Google Analytics has indexed it, says it’s great. IT NEVER APPEARS IN A GOOGLE SEARCH for IMPACT CHALLENGES.
The theory is that this is because Google has their own sub-domain registered at https://impactchallenge.withgoogle.com/uk2013.
Ironically, the only way I can get people to find my site (in Australia) is through AdWords where it features prominently – because there’s no competition.
I now find that I’m having to pay Google via click fees in order for people to find my site!
I spoke with AdWords people about this but of course they can’t comment on Search – only AdWords – where my campaign was doing just fine – as long as I’m happy to keep paying Google for anyone to be able to find my site.
On BING, the site comes up at number 1 position.
On Google, the site never comes up at all.
I really hope your article leads to some positive outcome.
Thanks
This is about impactchallenges.com — I think you’ve just run into not being SEO optimized for those words unquoted. The search string ‘ “impact challenges” scenarios ‘ — I’m quoting the phrase and adding the keyword scenarios– finds your site. I wouldn’t expect longdogwalks to necessarily show up on the first page for ‘long dog walks’ just because of the name either.
“portrait quilts” on the other hand, is still entirely lacking the site in question here, though. But Gauthier’s post has a bunch of reasons why that may be.
But the separate words “impact challenges” appear at the top of his page. So he’s not referring to the website name but the exact phrase on the page with no punctuation in between the words except a space. I would expect that to be ahead of “impact, challenges” but it’s not. (I wonder if he just added that phrase to the page due to your comment.)
Re – Impact Challenges – No “he” didn’t just add the phrase. The phrase was there since the site went up. Thanks for your support Ronc.
If Schmidt isn’t freaking out about how this could suddenly happen, then one is left to strongly suspect that it happened not by accident but by design.
Quick, somebody register snubbedbygoogle.com and start collecting stories until anecdote becomes plural enough to start looking like data.
Actually,
ScrewedbyGoogle.com even better but already registered.
Took suggestion and registered snubbedbygoogle.com.
Even if develop site not likely to show up in google but at $12.50 I’m not sweat’n it.
If Google “tweaks its algorithm” and “coincidentally” this disrupts previous rankings, putting different businesses at the top, then presumably those businesses that fall diwn the rankings and don’t have access to Eric Schmidt or to hundreds of Google staffers WILL spend more on AdWords etc. … So “algorithm tweaks” of this kind will be in Google’s interest
Interesting…
Actually impactchallenge.withgoogle.com/india2013 is #1.
Maybe I start using Bing.
Portrait Quilts appears a labor of love.
Just curious Bob… Is quilt business sis’s main revenue stream? ( if so- sorry for bringing it up)
PC Data founder sounds like a great gig.
portraitquilts.com is number one on DuckDuckGo too — but then it’s a proper search engine. Rather like Google used to be.
Um, DDG is a metasearch engine, not a search engine.
HI,
I see this a lot.
There are no guarantees but if it isn’t already, the site, which looks way out of date by the way, needs to use Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. This alone could reveal any problems and quite possibly resolve them too.
Good Luck
Cheers
Chris
Sure, just pay the extortionist the money and everything will be okay.
Google Analytics is Free…
Google Webmaster Tools are free, too…
Well SEO rank is inherently a net zero game, so I personally hope figuring out how you dropped in their ranks is a better strategy (for example maybe none of your happy customers do anything visible to google while google sites probably get a lot of g+ likes, etc) rather than using an ‘I know people’ method of extortion.
If we first assume google is actually fair then this thread reads like the mafia that will unravel it.
In this game, I think DDG, and any site I’ve never heard of have a better chance precisely because no one really cares about their ranking in them.
I’m with Christopher R. There are some default methods to start with, to look for clues about what’s happening here.
– Analytics (less and less useful though, since keywords are more frequently hidden here now)
– Webmaster Tools (as little as google exposes here, this is the definitive place google offers to look into this stuff)
– Server logs (e.g. has google stopped indexing because it’s stopped crawling? This is what helped me realize once I was blocking them from a big swath of my site in my robots.txt. Oops.)
Otherwise, this sort of smells like you’ve triggered one of google’s signals for spammy/blackhat SEO tactics. One of the big ones I hear preached is paying for text links on unrelated sites. Could the link from cringely.com actually be hurting the cause? (Seems unlikely, but maybe google’s wires got crossed…)
(I’d be happy to look into this a bit more. For some reason I consider this stuff almost “fun”!)
I am posting this too late and so it probably won’t be noticed, but you are correct – the site is out of date. I used to have a small commercial site selling facial cleanser and I found that if I did not update the site at least once per month, my site fell off of Google’s search results. So I put a new item on sale every month and that kept my ranking high. it doesn’t have to be a major change, just enough to make Google’s algorithm think the site is still relevant.
BTW – noticed that Portrait Quilts is buying ads now so it shows up as the top listing in the yellow colored box at the top of the page.
New domain? ebay shop? amazon shop? There are alternatives, I’m not sure they’re great alternatives, but they can work.
Actually Bob it’s not that hard to work out why it’s not ranking anymore, there are some fairly fundamental problems with the site that would be easy to fix.
Why did she used to be #1 and now not so much? 1. Fundamentals. 2. Old site, no changes. 3. Newer fresher sites that do it better. But mostly poor fundamentals, I see it all the time and it’s usually easy to fix.
And Google will be the first to tell you how – they make a great guide to help people if they take 2 mins and know to look.
I would be absolutely thrilled to be able to help her for you. No charge, as a thanks for all your work I’ve enjoyed over the years. Get in touch if you are interested. @michaelq on twitter.
PS Schmidt is an idiot.
+1
He can’t be too much of an idiot: “As an intern at Bell Labs, Schmidt did a complete re-write of the Lex analysis software program for the Unix computer operating system.” Plus he managed to accumulate 8.3 billion dollars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt
I stopped using Google for as much as is possible quite some time ago (personally – easy; work – slightly less so, but not impossible). For searching, I use a combination of DuckDuckGo and Bing. I think it’s down to web searchers to stop “googling”, so that the small businesses that are the search results actually get found.
If you have to pay for a “search” engine to find you, it’s plainly not a “search” engine – it’s a directory.
Yeah, starting about three months ago, Google tossed a huge wrench in to their search results. I’m not sure what the point was except to show people that nothing is safe? My company that publishes wine books: https://www.vinologue.com placed well for terms such as “priorat” given that we publish a book for it as well as other regions. Suddenly its result dropped to the 4th or 5 page.
Google, in articles from the last year claims it’s because they’re focusing on “quality” results that are more dynamic. Fair enough, except that we do update the site regularly and the sites that place above it are incredibly static and build upon code markup that looks like it’s from 1995 and written in MS Word. I don’t get it, but I guess this is Google prerogative and there’s nothing we can do to change it except I suppose use Bing.
Also of note is the PageRank update that was released a few days ago. Most sites it seems went down in ranking. But, it seems that, as several people have noticed, the data was pulled from months and months ago and is not reflecting current trends at all.
For a company whose #1 product is search you’d think things wouldn’t seem to be so broken.
Sounds like how the mafia used to sell “fire insurance” to mom-and-pop store owners. If they didn’t pay up, there would be an unfortunate accident.
Basically, you’re defining Yelp’s business strategy…
I did a search this morning and portraitquilts.com popped up number two in paid as words section of Google. Something happened or changed? I have always fealt Google was going to be like this. The idea that when you have a problem and you can speak to no one or get any help is a huge red flag, yet we have made them a powerful company. I found a web optimizer who gave me a bad review. Then found out he did it to everyone east of the Mid Cities, only to discover he works for a competitor and this is in direct violation of Googles review policy. It is artificially driving me down in rankings. I cannot get the bad review dropped or him sanctioned. Google could care less, based on my 2 days of efforts to speak to someone, email and chat. Google is the search engine. They control the web in my opinion. All my advertising is done on Google. I spend money with them. But their business model could care less. It is going to get worse……
Dear All,
Why don’t we simply, inspired by Wikipedia, start a non-profit, global search engine? With the readership of this blog we have enough talent and expertise.
Thinking of our future abundance based world, it is more than obvious that not only would a global encyclopedia be non-profit and transparent, but so too would our global search engine.
Time to begin….? Who will coordinate our collaboration effort? Who’s interested apart from me?
Without looking at details I would guess that google no longer weighs exact domain name matches as highly as they previously did.
My naive view is that this change makes sense. Owning a domain name that exactly matches a user query indicates only that you won the domain name lottery for that term, it implies nothing about the quality of your site.
On duckduckgo it is the first non sponsored link https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=portrait%20quilts but nowhere to be found on google.
I am liking duckduckgo more and more these days.
It’s showing up in paid links.
“portrait quilts” search
#2 top of search results, paid advertising
and
“photo quilts” search
#1 right side, paid advertising
They have stockholders to answer to.
They have to try to squeeze as much as they can out of their products.
That said, if they do a poor job and some other search engine comes along that pleases people. They’ll either make less money or go out of business entirely.
They also have a huge task in trying in index the entire Internet. They’re bound to screw up here and there.
It’s a really tough one. In my results it seems that none of the results for that query are particularly bad ones.
The real key to getting links in from other site, so for example if you had wrapped the link in your post with Photo Quilts then that would have helped the ranking for that search term.
As others have said, use the webmaster tools to look at the site content and incoming links. Put up fresh content.
In a way is’s *good* that Eric Schmid said he couldn’t help. Helping out individuals should not be happening, but it’s a reminder that having a single search engine driving so much of the traffic is bad for business and I hope to see a more balanced distribution between serach engines to make this kind of small change in an algorithm less devastating on a small business.
Clearly, your sister is entitled to have Google present her goods for sale above all of her competition permanently because they did so for a while. If I give a stranger $100 each month for 6 months, I’m stealing from him – mugging him – if I stop.
Google has remained dominant because they update their ranking system constantly. They have to do so to combat SEO companies’ efforts to compromise their results. Google’s business depends on making their search results relevant – and addictive – to people who are looking for information so they can sell search terms to people who are selling goods and services. Free search results in their business model are for providers of free information, not for sellers.
This is not surprising. The geniuses at Google think they’ve got it all figured out, that they have anticipated every possible query from pesky humans. Their canned responses and FAQs address most situations, but unfortunately there’s always a percentage of problems that don’t fit their model, and that need personal attention. That means customer service, which is [a] expensive and [b] boring to engineers, so it doesn’t happen.
When Google falls, they will have been brought down by their failure to do customer service.
You don’t get what you don’t pay for.
A search in a Google toolbar for the two separate words “portrait quilts” now shows an ad for portraitquilts.com with a number of 1 (800) 590 6080 as the top item…I’m sure you paid for that, but its still number one….
FWIW, when I search for stuff, I routinely ignore the ads precisely because I know they were paid for and not “page ranked” based on popularity.
seriously,
check the traffic. You’ve obviously generated a lot of hits for it recently.
If it is under 100 hits a month. Sorry, there’s nothing anyone can do. If it’s over a thousand a month and
not gettting onto someone’s list… that’s a problem.
Conventional advertising, and conventional word of mouth/web can increase the hits.
Also increase the sales.
BTW. partner with etsy and amazon.
Sending prayers for your mom. Google is too big to care about anything besides revenue and profits.
oh… btw…. if anyone wants to make a much, much better search engine, basing it on cognition rather than algorithms would be the way to go.
I can do the pseudocode, but making the ultimate sites for ballroom dance, guitar, and crafts is using up my time (in addition to the ultimate sites for kanji and pharmacology….already there).
anyway… email me through the link at http://www.nerdpocalypse.net
I find it very difficult to take any kind of advice from the dude that put together nerdpocalypse dot net. What the hell do your other “ultimate” websites look like?
As one who tried to take care of his mom in the last stages of her life. I can tell everyone who commented that Bob’s sister taking care of her mom probably takes up all her time and her website business is secondary. If I were her and could afford it, I would hire someone to act on your suggestions.
Oh…. and one final note.
Quilters never win and winners never quilt !
I have to second the comment regarding checking webmaster tools for problems. There are any number of possible issues that could have intervened…
One thing that has been phasing in, is that the clickthrough rate has become more important, or so I’ve read. This has led me to realize that many of my own sites’ descriptions and titles were poor, and needed to be fixed.
What drives _me_ nuts about Google indexing is always coming in after Wikipedia and a million YouTube videos, which, since they always have images, often have higher clickthrough rates that actual pages with real information delivered quickly. We’ve lost about half our Google clicks over the course of the last year. We’re still indexed but the combination of being dropped below any vaguely related YouTube videos (and usually Wikipedia as well) has really hurt. I have been slowly trying to tag pages with images and such but it’s a rather awkward, slow process.
The obvious answer to that is to do some videos. I’m about to embark on that angle as well. Quilted portraits could certainly run off some simple videos explaining how they work. I suspect people that like quilting would be interested.
The ranking issue – even given potential indirect contact to the very top of Google leaves one with only to blog as your Cringely. At least you have a big or bigger than most platforms.
The other issue is contact & redress paths. More and more coporate sites phone and web access is making it tough to impossible to get a real contact. Even if there is an email contact it’s to the submit internal request. Leaving no outside trail to say “i sent THIS on a given day & time” Of course most of these are coporations for profit. Just try to contact your Congressman/Senator direct by email. You’ll find you are channeled into limited drop down options essentially funneling you into the prepared answer queue . This is your Public representitave controlling the flow and direction. Leaving no one with ability to say THIS was sent and This is the response. The two can never come together.
I just ran google, duckduckgo, and bing searches.
On google your sister’s site is the second “ads related to photo quilts” and is not elsewhere on the front page.
On duckduckgo your sister’s site is the third entry, behind one sponsored and one regular link.
On bing your sister’s site is the sixth entry, the first four being ads.
The website is well done with some good SEO features albeit dated.
Unfortunately It has a few technical problems and on top of that managed to hit every single BIG issue that get you down listed or banned from Google pronto:
1 Hidden Text, visible to search engine but not to visitor. (Misleading Page are now downgraded)
2 Lots of external Links (Link farm are downgraded).
3 Keyword stuffing (Neutral but no benefit).
4 Lacks a siteamp.xml and robots.txt (normally not crucial but so much easier when present!)
1 & 2 are some of the key element Google looks for to detect misleading pages which used to plague it’s search results. Clearly your pages are not misleading, however Google will identify them as misleading.
So I would advise to shape up the site to modern practices.
Step 1: Have the meta Description and keywords match actual content of the page (and not the site!)
While you are at it, cleanup the useless meta (generator/robots/revisit etc.)
Step 2: since the site is xhtml, validate each page with the W3 Validator there are some bugs there
Step 3: Get rid of hidden text (move that to the alt of the image instead).
Step 4: Add more Text to the pages.
Step 5: Use properly one H1 per page
Step 6: Cleanup the link page, and do not make the whole text a big link.
Step 7: On the shop pages use a Product Shema.
Step 8: Add the missing robots.txt and sitemap.xml
Step 9: Create a Facebook and a Google+ page. Of course cross link them with the website.
Caught trying to game the Google algorithm… It’s best not to try to work the algorithm you’re livelihood depends upon. Kinda like a guy getting banned from a soup kitchen for putting on a fake mustache and hopping back in line.
Everything Gauthier said is spot on.
Yep, before complaining about Google and saying SEO is bunk, please check the minimal compliance to what is known about SEO. No need to pay someone to do it for you. Everything Gauthier said is pretty right on. Its not gaming, its being in the game. And its something you can’t do just once, but at least a few times a year or after a sudden drop in traffic / pagerank.
There obviously things to complain about Google, but this isn’t one of them. Plus before worrying about Google as a monopoly. One who has delivered value to everyone over and over and over. How about attacking truely evil corporations that kill people, destroy democracy or pollute the planet to a degree that kills people. You know like Oil Companies, Telcos, Cigarette Companies, etc.
The following links will give you some basic analysis, but they pretty much say what Gauthier says (I of course just googled “seo online analysis free” to find them, these are just the results of the first two):
https://www.woorank.com/en/www/portraitquilts.com
https://www.reactionengine.com/analyse?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.portraitquilts.com&keyphrase=Portrait+Quilts#document
I’m sorry Robert, but I really have to disagree with what you’re saying about Google.
There’s no doubt that Google has given a big contribution for many years in making internet a better place with better websites. There’s also no doubt that today Google is the biggest problem that keeps internet from moving forward.
I’ve followed very closely the SEO world for a long time. What many experts are saying today is that Google search results seem more and more randomized today. When I heard so many people talking about this I remembered having heard about patent filed years ago by Google for an algorithm to periodically randomize the first 50 positions of the search ranking. The path is clear, and also this is a very common opinion; there’s no free lunch at Google, if you want traffic you can’t rely on organic results, you must PAY.
Google IS evil. They are facing an antitrust case in Europe where they risk to pay a fee even bigger than that given to Microsoft years ago. Many companies have sued Google because it’s competing with them (booking flights for example) and there’s evidence of Google manipulating search results to favor their service over that of competing companies.
I think that never in human history a company has had so much power in its hands. And they’re not using it well. They can kill any business in a second.
Their search results are CRAP. They are so focused on forcing you to pay for ads that they purposely give bad search results so that people click on the ads. Don’t believe me? Try to use Yandex or Duckduckgo for one week (they are actually collaborating) instead of Google. When I’ve tried I’ve never looked back. I’m using exclusively duckduckgo and I ALWAYS find what I’m looking for with that search engine. Who cares if they give you only 10000 results for a search instead of 10M? What matter are the first 20 anyway.
I’m sorry for the quilt business but you should find other ways to promote the business through alternative channels. I can suggest Pinterest, Stumbleupon (yes, it drives traffic, more than you can imagine), Tumblr and Polyvore for example. They require time and dedication to build an audience but they will pay in the long term.
I assume you know thIs, but I have one issue with your recommendations as an old time markup user.
“Step 5: Use properly one H1 per page”
Really? H1 is not the title element. There was no intent, comment or suggestion in the spec to back this concept up. By expecting this, if Google’s algorithm actually is, they have effective removed one key element from HTML for no reason.
Sorry to hear about this, especially right before the holiday.
Everything Gauthier said is spot on. Fix those problems, get tied into Google Webmaster Tools and try to gain some real links, which this article will likely help.
If your sister would like to some free help with this, just email me and I’ll assign one of our people to tackle the issue at no cost. Good luck.
The best, most practical advice I’ve seen in these comment. While everyone else, myself included, “pontificated”; you put the rubber on the road.
Wow, Bob is mad because Scroogle changed their search results.
Since when did a private business have the obligation to make sure search results were all inclusive? Can Google optimize their product so that their paying customers get eyes on their product offerings?
So Google has become #1 in search and now is utilizing their market position to extract more money from their customers. The next words out of Bob’s mouth may be “search monopoloy… regulation.”
For goodness sake, look at a Google search results – you have to get good at ignoring the paid advertisements on the top and right sides to really see the results below. If Google’s search isn’t the utopia of the past, move on to the next garage search engine util that too becomes a bastion of capitalism.
I find all this a bit self serving.
Therefore let us praise the self-service of a business to the ends of the earth, eh? Google is (conservatively) inching into the space that we would have called “public utilities” back when “public” wasn’t an epithet. We indulge Google’s fantasy of pretending they’re a person because something’s in it for us, not because they’re entitled to it.
But we’re not a civilized nation anymore, just a confederation of 300-odd million warlords.
Google already has a means of addressing these problems called Google Webmaster Tools. You don’t mention anything about your well-connected computer expert of a sister checking there so hopefully that’s the first thing she did. (Sorry if that comes across as cold but I’m not sure you realize how privileged and snooty your “now I’m really angry because she used her connections to get a hold of Eric Schmidt but he ignored us!” whine sounds.)
The first thing I notice from looking at her HTML is that it is stuffed with “keywords” in the meta tag. Google actively discourages this practice and publicly states that it could hurt your rankings: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358
In fact if she Googles “google index guidelines” she’ll find that Google spells out plenty of tips on how to be sure she is indexed properly, the most important of which is setting up Google Webmaster Tools so she can be informed of any problems.
It may seem like a lot of grunt work for someone with such esteemed connections in the computer industry, but if she derives a significant portion of her livelihood from this website then it’s worth the time to do it right.
I have come to the conclusion that you should *never* depend on Google for anything important, ever (I’ve even quit using Google Voice, and I pay for another VoIP service because paid service with support is cheaper than “free”). There are alternatives to traffic generation, one being FaceBook. You can get some free traffic there, and even the paid traffic is much less expensive (and more effectively targeted) than AdWords.
.
Just remember, you are *not* a Google customer unless you spend at least $50,000/month on them. You are a Google “product” and you have about the same rights as any other product, e.g., zip.
.
I no longer use AdWords for anything on any of my sites, nor do I bother with SEO on any of my sites. It’s just not necessary, nor is it a deliberate part of my business model.
.
I would recommend that your sister start a newsletter, and build a list. So far, Google has not found a way to screw with that. BTW: I have used ImnicaMail and MailChimp, and I would *NOT* recommend either of them. Aweber is the least expensive of the really good commercial email vendors that I have seen so far (and I’m still open to suggestion).
.
Bing is my current default search engine, and DuckDuckGo is my 1st alternative. Google is what I try last, if at all. Bing and DuckDuckGo currently give me better results on most searches than Google, especially for anything business-related or work-related. Unfortunately, the hordes of epsilon-minuses think that Google is The Search Engine.
.
@Dave: The reason that YouTube indexes ahead of you is that Google owns YouTube, and adding tagged images to your sites won’t help much. If you depend on Google for anything important, you will lose.
Deep down, I just knew Google was evil… (and I also get to the bonus of linking the words… Google and evil together… twice!)
It’s not evil protecting your own livelihood from those trying to game the system. Google needs to keep people employing black hat seo techniques from being at the top, otherwise they are not providing the best search service they can.
Think about the other contenders for “portrait quilt” keywords who are playing by the rules. Are they evil for protecting those other contenders interests?
Bob’s sister’s site is essentially trying to cheat to get better rankings on SERPs. They are now realizing the consequences of thinking they could outwit Google, the service they paid nothing to get on and has been supplying them customers for years.
I think you should reconsider who you feel is in the wrong in this situation.
A year ago, I had an issue where my Google search listing was correct, but my business hours [they listed me as closed] and my associated map (provided also by Google) was off by *miles*, driving my customers in the wrong direction and into confusion. I called Google. I listened to the options for incoming calls, none of which offered telephone support. I pressed zero, and a person answered. I explained that I understood they don’t normally take support calls by phone, but would she listen to my case. She passed me over to the correct person and within days, my issue was resolved. Wish they provided that for everyone.
Gauthier nails it. Out of date, if not actively discouraged, practices get you penalised in rankings.
Yes, Google could be a more transparent but they don’t really have to be. This kind of information is freely available from them (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34432?hl=en) and a million other sources.
Bob, I just looked at your sister’s home page code, and I saw a number of potential improvements that could help her with the search rankings. Specifically the title tag, the description meta tag, and the h1 and h2 tags need a little tweaking. It’s a bit too much for a comment post, but I’ll email you with the details and some suggestions.
I was able to get my friend’s website to show up on page 1 for a certain set of keywords after I made a few tweaks. Maybe your sister can get her site back on page 1, too.
Jon
I think google is a nasty piece of crap company who cares about nothing but making lots of money on us
and selling info on us to other companies. I do NOT us gmail nor google search(I use duckduckgo.com which does NOT track what you serch for) nor google chrome ( I use SRware Iron browser from Germany with a lot
more privacy protection) avoid google and facebook like the plague they are evil mean anti privacy companies
For a problem like this, contacts in the technology industry are not necessarily helpful because people like Eric Schmidt can easily dodge small requests from acquaintances. More helpful would be widespread coverage in the media. Don’t you have any powerful media contacts in your network of journalists?
Bob,
This is your big chance to do your “I told you so” dance! You’ve written about this before — we are not Google’s customers; the advertisers are. We (suckers/lusers/innocents) have come to rely on Google for their free services, but they are under absolutely no obligation to provide them fairly, evenly, reliably or even at all. In business terms, your sister has been using the free version of their service for years and now Google would like to “convert” her into a paying customer. You called it! 🙁
Seriously it sucks this happened, but it really does happen all the time. Some of the previous posts about the site content being “suspicious” are probably right on; Google updates their algorithms almost daily to try to knock out spammers/squatters/crap and your sister got swept up in one of their purges. You’re right about SEO companies being full of crap though — I do IT work for a couple of them and the only real “wisdom” they have is from reading Google’s developer blogs every day. They’re all just as much in the dark about search rankings as you and I.
Also, don’t discount the possibility that a competitor is linking to your sister’s site from a link farm (or whatever) in order to game the system and push her out of the search rankings. Google’s Webmaster Tools system should be able to tell you if that’s happening.
I have the exact same problem as your sister. My site http://www.barnloftprints.com is invisible on google.
We have tried everything per Google’s online instructions.
You have the meta tag in your source code that tells search engines NOT to index your site –
Change that line to:
That should do it –
Google stinks. I’ve been using Bing and Blekko for a while now. Among others.
I’m wondering when the last time your sis updated her web pages…perhaps Google is looking for currency when their robot crawls the web pages. A small update on each page may help.
I will be praying for your mother and your family.
.
Regarding your sister’s or other’s websites, I guess this was to be expected. As the Internet gets bigger and bigger, and there are more and more websites, and Google’s database gets bigger and bigger — I guess it could be expected the smaller operations would vanish from Google’s search. The way Google rates sites and searches for them will eventually cause this to happen.
.
Google appears to operate with a completely “type-less” search operation. It does not place any special value on search terms. In the case of your sister searching on Portrait Quilts yields nothing. Searching on “Portrait Quilts” comes up with nothing. Yet you can get a hit on PortraitQuilts. It would nice if Google would recognize those words as proper nouns and do a subsearch with them. Sometimes Google recognizes location search words, sometimes not. It would be nice if you could flag some of your search terms as data types…
.
Google’s rating system is based in part on the number of other sites linking to a given site. As the big sites get bigger, the small sites don’t have a chance. Today I can put in a search term and the first couple dozen hits will be sites within Amazon, Walmart, Target…. It is pretty frustrating. If my search involves a big site, I’d like to have one and only one search result for it and an option to get more results from the same domain.
.
Searches like “john doe’s blog,” or “john doe’s website,” or “john doe’s business in city” should always get you to that person’s web content. Google is beginning to fail in this area. If Google were really smart, they’d be listening to feedback and making the necessary adjustments. Too many firms hurt themselves when they stop listening.
Your sister makes a good advertisement for Bing currently. She doesn’t show up in the first 5 pages of the google search where it starts to stop showing services and gets further out of field. So, unlike what some have said, it isn’t just a matter of Google ranking other companies ahead of her. She appears to be missing entirely. On Bing she shows up on the first page.
Actually it could also be said that it’s a good advertisement in favor of Google over other search engines. As others have pointed out, Google goes to great effort to remove pages based on old SEO tricks which they say are clearly still present in the site in question. The other search engines are all still being fooled by these old tricks which means they can be gamed whereas Google cannot be gamed.
Hello Bob
Godaddy or Google (or others of course) offer free Google AdWord credits. Use those credits to set up an AdWord Account. This will force Google to recognize and rank the site, or provide other valuable information. Additionally, with the AdWord account (real) people can look up any issues with the domain.
Once the free credits are used, stop using Adwords.
Thank you
Rick
Wont echo some of the recommendation already made. I am not affiliated with either site, but i do frequent them as part of my morning coffee routine. A recent posting of Google ranking factors may have information that will be helpful.
https://www.coolinfographics.com/blog/2013/12/9/googles-200-ranking-factors.html
links to https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226884
links to https://www.entrepreneur.com/dbimages/article/ranking_factors_infographic_2.jpg
Sorry to hear about your Mother Bob. Our prayers are with you and your loved ones.
I have to wonder if your sister is really making quilts. It looks to me like she is just buying quilts and pillows, and then running them through a specialized inkjet printer.
Bob, I am sorry to hear about your mom and I am praying for her.
Your mom and your family will be in our hearts and prayers.
Probably need to add a google+ page. so they pump up tier social network.
I have an online English-Japanese dictionary and I relied on Google AdSense for many years.
A few months ago they decided to ban me for promoting pedophilia. They pointed me to word definitions for “pedophilia” in my dictionary and said they don’t allow such things…
Same thing happened few years ago with translations for words like “sex industry” and “prostitute”, but back then I actually got a reply from a Human and they apologized and lifted the ban. Now it’s all bots and automated copies of the same email. Nobody responds. Not even on the forums. I have no idea what these 50k people working for Google do there. Probably substituting vi with Emacs 😀
If there are no other factors, then it seems to me there may be a restraint of trade suit in there, somewhere.
[…] via Hacker News https://www.cringely.com/2013/12/10/sisters-quilter-google-mugged/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss… […]
About a month ago, youtube decided Harlan Ellison, reasonably famous author and screenwriter, and notable for having written _The City On The Edge of Forever_ for _Star Trek_, as well as _A Boy and His Dog_, and two episodes of _The Outer Limits_, simply didn’t exist. Never mind what your lying eyes are reading, it all turns out to have been the planet Venus all along.
This is the peril of 100% trusting machine learning algorithms. It’s not that I don’t trust the machines because I do – they do exactly what they’re told to do. What I don’t trust are the people who design these algorithms.
Looks like DuckDuckGo put your sister’s site at the top, but no where to be found on google. This is no joke man. I am sorry.
Google and Facebook and a vast array of other companies have one MO now: HIDE FROM THE CUSTOMER.
They perpetrate offenses and then hide. Facebook will delete your business’s page with no excuse and no recourse. PayPal will freeze your funds.
This is why everyone should avoid being dependent on “the cloud” as much as possible. When you put your assets or livelihood in the hands of a third party, you’re going to get screwed at whim.
In this case, there’s little alternative unfortunately. But these guys are scum, so it’s almost a cliché to point these affronts out anymore.
404, not found: https://www.portraitquilts.com/robots.txt
There are a lot of things your sister can do to help get her site indexed, I’d start with that ^.
Best of luck.
1. I believe adding a G+ page will help.
2. Ensuring the robots.txt file and sitemap are sorted helps.
3. Check webmaster tools and resolve any issues it warns you about.
4. Profit?
Best wishes to your Mother and family in this difficult time. May this trial bring your family closer together.
…and email Amit Singhal. 😉
I hate to be a downer, but in what way was your sister entitled to free traffic from another business?
The business world has been a little ditorted for a few years while G was all touchy feely, but they’ve finally grown up and are joining the rest of us in being evil (I’m sad, but its just the way the world is).
First set of questions – has she checked her site for problems? is she still being crawled? No virus on the site? ie no technical reason why the bots would be having a problem?
Second set of questions – what business building has she done? Is her business well branded so people are able to look for her bu name that actually means her?
There was a mindset for a long time that customers just magically happen, but its not true, you have to work on bringing them in and you cant complain if someone else stops delivering by the truckload toyour frot door for nothing 🙁
Do what I do … don’t use anything Google and encourage others to do likewise.
And prayers for your mother.
[…] you read this article by Robert X Cringely, you’ll see where I am going with this as someone that relied upon being […]
You’re sister has a page on her site linked from the primary navigation that is full of spammy links.
https://www.portraitquilts.com/info/links
Getting rid of that crap is a good start. Then there’s more work to do.
Your sister has been participating in link exchanges and building spammy links on crappy websites. It’s likely she was hit by the Google Penguin algorithm update that penalizes or demotes sites for trying to manipulate search rankings by creating links in volume with “money” keyword anchor text.
This practices violates Google’s webmaster guidelines and she was caught.
I’ve been helping others out with the same problem. It’s not an easy fix.
Interesting..
Who are you to tell that ‘SHE’ bought those links? Perhaps they were bought FOR her, by some hideous person performing bad seo on her site?
This is the question I asked Matt Cutts, how DOES Google determine whether or not a link is bought by the site owner, OR, by some third party wanting to hurt?
The fact that she has a page on her site full of spammy links and a dirty backlink profile leads me to believe that she actively participated in the process.
I googled “quilt, portrait” and her site was the first ad listed.
I’ve also taken a look at the site you have described and based on the markup of the site it looks dated and not at all optimized to modern standards, among a few SEO other issues I identified right off the bat.
So she purchased advertising? The site is coming up as the #2 result.
welcome to internet marketing….
google ranks and deranks sites ALL the time. they CHANGE search algo’s 2-3 times a year.
like others said google webmaster tool first. add a blog, add/change more content, change keywords in meta to be page specific NOT site everything….or since your all so pc data hip, change to site to wordpress blog/shopping site, there are probably 100 shopping cart plugin’s out there.
sell for 25% more on amazon or etsy to recoup fees, or drive traffic to your site. amazon listings are FREE!
or do adwords, 10 cent’s a click won’t hurt for a few months.
now aren’t you glad you know people who know people?
Perhaps it is ‘bad seo’ by a third party?
Google doesn’t seem to be the problem, your sisters site is badly coded. Make all the changes others have recommended, and maybe next time instead of bashing google, maybe do a little research and remember that the web is constantly evolving and you must evolve with it. No business survives by never changing. Maintaining a high rank on google requires work, Also I find it hard to believe that she couldn’t get a hold of google for help, I work for a web development company and we call google all the time and always get a person on the phone and they are always helpful.
Google doesnt care about you. They have started demoting pages so that now pay for adwords then they promote other pages to give a taste of page 1 them demote them to get the pay per click. Google is a scam. Google is run by apathetic money grubbers. They are rich and arrogant. They do not care. I choose not to use Google anymore but what do they care.
Take to twitter! I had a friend that had this happen to his places listing. I finally tracked down a rep via Twitter and it finally got fixed.
Nail on head though, no one but google knows how google works.
I have a loath/ hate relationship with them most days.
Prayers for your Mom, Bob.
As for Google and the other companies who have made the subtle but nefarious transition from indexing the vastness of the Net to harvesting and selling all of our personal information, their days are numbered. The backlash is building every day, and the barriers to entry get lower and lower.
[…] My Sister’s A Quilter And Google Mugged Her! Portrait Quilts is my sister’s web site where for several years she has sold quilts, pillows, and tote bags printed with customer photographs. This is how she makes her living, selling on the web and through photo stores.Then approximately three months ago Google decided that Portrait Quilts does not exist. […]
I work at Google and help webmasters with issues like these. As others here have mentioned, this site’s ranking is being affected because of webspam that our algorithms have found. This includes unnatural links and participation in link schemes ( https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356 ), for example with
links such as https://www.europeanvacationvillas.com/linkmachine/resources/resources_1_-_travel_accomodations_17.html & http://nyautobodyrepairshops.com/business-2/ . You can find out more about some of our webspam algorithms at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ch/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html .
It looks like they also posted in our help forum — where experienced webmasters can chime in and help with common issues: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/f0WIQRDGFlI . The help forums are usually a good place to get started (there are also many other good webmaster forums), we also regularly do office-hours hangouts where webmasters can ask their questions live.
Inbound links to the site play a big part in how Google chooses to rank them. A quick look at the link profile for the site shows some dodgy looking sites linking to hers.
You try and cheat Google by buying spammy links or registering with dodgy directories and they will punish you.
Google wants to give people the best result. You can’t simply have a dated and poorly designed site that never gets updated and expect to retain a top listing forever. If your sister relies on her website to make a living she needs to understand how the world of search rankings works not blame Google for demoting her.
Hi Bob,
I’m sorry to hear about your situation. There are some good tips on here about why this may have happened – Gauthier lays down some essential advice. Learning about SEO takes time, but it is well worth it. This guide is a great place to start: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo.
Follow the SEO advice in that and maybe think about moving to a WordPress site if you want an easier way to maintain that site. You can get plugins that manage many SEO aspects for you.
Google does not have to show your site #1. Your site is indexed (go to google and search “site:portraitquits.com” to confirm this).
Looking at your competition, it is easy to see why a site like http://bonniemccaffery.com/ (3rd in my search results after two pinterest boards) would outrank you. It’s not an amazing site but it has got the basics of SEO right. If you want to get back to #1 you need to pay attention to the fundamentals that google releases – things like title tags and optimising for sharing.
For the long game, it’s a risky strategy to rely solely on Google for customers. Maybe try leveraging some existing craft marketplaces too. Get yourself a social media presence, build a pinterest board of the quilts and so on.
My overall message is one of possibility. Looking at the results, there is nothing to be scared of. Your site can rank highly again, but you will need to do some work. If I can help in any way, please get in touch.
Apparently all the visitors have made a difference because it shows up ahead of the pintrest sites when I searched. I will pray for your family.
Emily
Yeah thats not googles fault.
Your sister had it good when her bad website got traffic.
She needs to just improve her site and get some good links.
The more I see how Google handles power, whether it’s through search filtering, video takedowns or whatever else, the more I think maybe government services aren’t such a bad idea after all. As inefficient as they may be, at least you get some kind of hearing if someone f*s up. People say the government shouldn’t pick winners, but that’s what Google is doing, and even more arbitrarily than the government ever would.
Time for an anti-trust action.
You seriously want your search engine run by the same people as healthcare,gov?
…or the IRS or the mapping of voting districts…
Tell sister to comply with seo guidelines, not to delve too much into stuff like various “seo services” do or make it look like, Matt Cutts do issue help on general basis, there aren’t much pages on her site, only 44 pages indexed by google.
The algorithms favor auto and big data sites, as it looks, the result of the changes in panda and penguin are visible on results page, google is trying to fill in the direct server role, cutting the end points, so we see the information panels on results, say portraitquilts, see the panel on right.
Get her to include text and descriptions, it could be testimonials or stuff, better support pages of whatever.
She is already into tech. shouldn’t be a problem for her.
Since whole details are published, search engine experts and blogs, try to guess based on observations.
related but unrelated: Dave Winer (scripting.com) wrote about dropbox link indexed better than others: http://scripting.com/2013/11/18/weirdGoogleSearchResult
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
USA
telephone: +1 650 253 0000
fax: +1 650 253 0001
your gonna have to call and fax a-lot but they will eventually get back to you providing you are a paying customer for some of their business services.
Wonder if the recommended changes would work. If it is at #132 or whatever, the how about every search for photo quilts, and click on that particular link.
Sorry to hear of her troubles.
Looks like some others have already tried to help:
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/cR1_yblx2CE
Seems to be some areas that might improve things after being addressed.
If you buy even just $10 of AdWords your ranking in Google will be dramatically increased. Try it, but be sure to buy very specific + targeted keywords.
Just tried it. Her site was the #2 result.
Just to provide you with some more data, I googled “portrait quilts”. As others have noted, your sister’s site is coming up number 1 in the paid search area. For me (and, yes, it varies by user and geography) the first organic appearance was your sister’s site’s keyword page at position 121. Right above it at 120 was a link to your blog post. Perhaps you should handle her marketing. Perhaps the Google machine could use a little human guidance in formulating its rankings.
Thanks for posting this, the feedback (well some of it) is very helpful to those of us managing web sites.
Best wishes to you, your family, and especially your mom.
Solve the problem by telling your readers to ignore Google.
If you look up “photo quilts” on Bing you will see your little sisters site in the second unpaid position.
[…] https://www.cringely.com/2013/12/10/sisters-quilter-google-mugged/ […]
This is a link audit on the site in question showing all the manipulation to the search engines and proving why google called it correctly and penalized it fairly.
http://linkaudit.co.uk/blog/did-cringely-call-out-google-as-robbers-unfairly/
Stop using Google for search and use https://ixquick.com instead.
I’ve never experienced this “hazing” by Google myself, myself, but if you’ve ever listened to Jeff Levy, “The Tech Guy” radio show on the weekends (KFI in L.A. and KSFO in the Bay Area), he seems to have at least one or two calls per week about someone who has experienced a similar situation with Google, and no one seems to have an answer or any idea on howto deal with it.
This appears not to just be about “poor service” (as rampant as that is in the world of on-line services), this appears to be deliberate arrogance and confrontation on Google’s part. Their attitude is overtly “We’re gonna do it how we feel like it and not tell you anything, so if you’re the one we destroy, go pound sand!”
Even the U.S. Government has the consideration to try to make it LOOK like they’re not screwing over their customers while they’re doing it. Google is so arrogant as to practically brag about it!
If I may address one other point in Bob’s article that no one is commenting on regarding Eric Schmidt supposedly telling Gordon Eubanks that “he was sorry but he couldn’t help”…..with all due respect, I strongly suspect that either a) Eubanks just said that to get Cringley off his back, or b) What Eric Schmidt really meant wasn’t that he couldn’t help, but rather that he didn’t WANT to help.
I’m almost certain that if it was Eric Schmidt’s sister who was having a similar problem, he would most certainly be “able to help.”
That being said, it seems to me the solution is obvious….if you want better traffic for yourself on Google, and you’re not sure how to design your website (or anything else) to do it, you buy the Adwords. I mean, isn’t that what they’re for? Why be a purist who ends up losing out? The way the game is rigged is that if you want to play, you have to pay. Certainly not the first (or ten-thousandth) time that’s happenned in our industry. And that may have been Schmidt’s attitude about the whole thing.
Claim her business on GooglePlaces, Bing Local, Yahoo Buiness, YELP, and other directory services.
Put links to her website in all of the above that allow it.
Put links to her website on your and your friends websites.
Social Media accounts can help. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr – these can automatically be posted to with every entry on a Scoop.it website.
Look to some company that gives more $$ to Google.
It has a history of pointing to clients and not research results, especially here in Oz.
Sleep with a bugging device with someone at Google is my advice.
Or get USA Justice Dept to investigate, oh sorry the Feds and NSA are in bed with google already.
Bad luck little lady! Only the huge survive!
I used the following search term: “portrait quilts” buy It ended up on the first page, but not the first listing. Then, the odd thing. Search : buy “portrait quilts” and then it doesn’t.
This is a post of someone with a similar problem, and how he managed to fix it
http://moz.com/blog/panic-stations-how-to-handle-an-important-page-disappearing-from-google-case-study
Hope this will help.
Seems that some of us north of the border have noticed that something is amiss…
http://business.financialpost.com/2013/12/13/google-inc-abusive-competition-bureau/?__lsa=c50d-1387
My former employer (an educational institution) has maintained my website in a simple form for years with a link pointing to my commercial offshoot. A few weeks ago, I noticed the home page was no longer reported, but a vaguely related subdirectory was still indexed. So I used the webmaster tools to attempt to re-list the home page. Soon after, Google stopped reporting *any* pages whatsoever on the old website. Even if the search is restricted to pages just on the old site (site:domain syntax), zero hits are reported.
In contrast, bing.com, yahoo.com and duckduckgo.com all report the old website using an obvious keyword for the old subject matter… and report it as the #1 hit.
I’ve also seen shenanigans in Google Scholar, and reporting the errors had no effect.
For what it worth, I ordered a beautiful pillow from two very nice person on the phone when I called Portrait Quilts. Thank you for the heads up! I trust others have done the same.
The same thing happened to our small business, just a couple days ago. I think it does amount to them wanting to make the Internet a paid place for business. I am the office manager at Dave’s Carpet & Upholstery Cleaning in Los Angeles. Our business listing, which has been active since at least 1999, was “disabled” due to one possible violation from a basket of violations listed on a boiler plate link. All we can think is that they do not think a residential address could be a legitimate headquarters. We do actually own a business building, and we are a legitimate California corporation, but due to real estate prices, the building is not as close to our clientele as we would like. So we use the home office address in our listing. We have this address for 15 years, and it is truthfully where we do conduct business (it’s clear on our business listing that we come to the customer, and they do not come to us, so the existence of a home office address should not be considered a violation). We suspect that Google has recently disabled the profiles of many small businesses for these same reasons. We are very distressed and have received no response except for a completely perfunctory one in the beginning, but nothing addressing our problem and certainly nothing reinstating our disabled profile. Our business has gone way down. Something needs to be done because we do not feel we should have to pay Google Ad Words or Ad Sense. We did that for a couple of years, but it didn’t seem to make any difference in our business, so why should we have to pay now because they do not think we are legitimate. Something needs to happen because Google is trying to capitalize and monetize the internet. They already have a near-monopoly. But that can change, if the people want it. Monopoly is never a good thing.
You said “‘disabled’ due to one possible violation”. What’s the possible violation? There were a number of knowledgeable posters (above) who made great suggestions about how to fix the problems with Cringely’s sister’s site. They would need to see your site and know the alleged violation, as well as what you mean by “disabled” in quotes. I don’t think a residence address means anything. I get a lot of hits in Google at my residential address and all I have is a business license and a Win98 laptop hosting a static site with no SEO at all. (Admittedly, I don’t rely on it for anything more than having a presence on the web.)
Bob, Something funny is going on. At 12:25 pm, CST, I entered “portrait quilts” in the Google window and the first one that showed up was https://www.portraitquilts.com/. It was identified as a Google paid ad. Since your sister did not pay, I conclude that Google dumped your sister because (1) it was getting paid to do so, and/or (2) somebody is squatting on your sister’s domain. Google’s participation in both alternatives does not smell very good.
Bob, Something funny is going on. At 12:25 pm, CST, I entered “portrait quilts” in the Google window and the first one that showed up was https://www.portraitquilts.com/. It was identified as a Google paid ad. Since your sister did not pay, I conclude that Google dumped your sister because (1) it was getting paid to do so, and/or (2) somebody is squatting on your sister’s domain. Google’s participation does not smell very good.
Many years ago Cold Fusion controversy raged. I knew at once it was 99% bullsh-t! Because background radiation was at 4 degrees K and not 4 million degrees K. It went away in a year when others tried to duplicate the experiment and failed. What has this got to do with Ms Cringley and Google? Plenty!
Let me explain.
In the Penny Scandal with google Penny made many internet sites –
http://www.penny.com/bed or http://www.penny.com/nail or http://www.penny.com/dress and ended up first on google search. Google got to hear about it and modified its algorithm to eliminate Penny from their search. The beauty and problem of their actions is that if they made the sites invisible the sites then still existed and were invisible to google and their masters the NSA!
Google also set up sites to prove that Bing was hopeless. Sites like http://www.dg5xvy6.com/qj4% would appear on Bing but not on google.
Well Google has told us how to fight it and NSA intrusions.
Find the sites and use them as your own.
Tell the Mafia these sites. Tell terrorist these sites. Tell any one who wants privacy these sites.
Suddenly Google is paranoid. Suddenly NSA is paranoid.
Make Anonymous exercises in illegal activities. There are no laws broken for virtual crimes.
Fcuk with their brains.
I, Cringley should be in the site — http://www.dg5xvy6.com/qj4%
And Google’s power fails and NSA needs quadruple.
They become as in the Wizard of Oz midgets!!
And stop playing games with Ms Cringley.
[…] I saw a public example of these recently where the self-proclaimed ‘sex symbol’ Robert X. Cringely wrote a post about his sister’s site losing rankings. […]