Thursday, October 26, 2006

So its true - Google is intelligent and it penalises you if you try to be oversmart

Google has blocked almost all the sites that were participating in the Shaastra Google SEO Event, including mine :( Now if you search for the keywords Shaastra Thamesportal Zalecenia Autophytes Invernesshire on google, you will find blogs that have just one or two posts, blogs that have been started but never taken care of, and blogs that are not at all participating in this contest!!
Yes ... a big blow to all those who have been trying so hard for over a month now. Here is a screenshot from my google webmaster page that clearly shows that google has removed all my pages from its index:-

You can also see it was last indexed on 19th Oct,2006. That was when my page achieved the top spot. You can still see the cached page here. But now, its banned......... :(

My dream of SANDEEPs winning this contest is shattered :(
Now I understand. Google, you are intelligent.
Ohh... I forgot to mention why has it been banned. It is banned because of Keyword Spamming. One-tenth(not sure) of the words on my blog were just the keywords. With such a high keyword ratio, how can it go undetected by the search engine giant Google? I knew that Google penalises you for keyword spamming. But I had to do this because the contest had not left much options.
1. You had to host your blog in their domain and you were not allowed to use keywords in your domain name.
2. There was not any control over the template other than choosing another template.
3. This also means no control on meta tags like keywords, description, etc.
4. And many may suggest getting links was a good option. But PR does not changes so quickly. Also it takes time before you come out of the google sandbox. This contest had only allowed you one and half months and now only 4 days are left. Till now, no blog participating in this contest has a PR greater than zero.

So contestants were left with no other option that blatant keyword spamming. All those who have ever been in top 10 had done the same.
However, what surprises me is why they banned all of a sudden. I mean if its not manual banning, then the site should have been banned as soon as google bot detected the spamming. This was been done for more than one and half a month. Google cant be so late in detecting such simple keyword spamming. And if its manual ban, then why at all Google Bangalore sponsored this contest?(see the sponsor on top right of this page)
Well.... Google's ways are mystery.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

#3 - META tags are ignored by search engines after the late 1990s, so that wouldn't have helped.

SRIKANTH AD said...

hi this is ATRIEECS
u had a chat with sandeepeecs
here is srikantheecs the 2nd member for ATRIEECS.seo...

adsrikanth@gmail

love to hear from you Sandy !

Anonymous said...

hi, this is priyaven.
ALL the entries are out, except for three. and i dont think we're out because of keyword stuffing... not everyone opted for keyword stuffing, and the people who still show up are people who've copied MY keyword-stuffed posts [much like a lot of others]. also, many blogs created at the beginning of the contest and left unupdated dont show up either. i think sandboxing is a normal google procedure, and it had happened before to me at the beginning of the contest. i think it's just a matter of time [dont ask me how much] before we're back in the race.