Google The Bully

[Xarex]

This is detailed. I'm not holding any information from you. I want anyone who reads this to understand what is going on and my own confusion.

I hope to give knowledge as well as gain it. Feel free to read it and please, if you have any suggestions, questions, comments, etc, please add to the discussion.

I seem to go from one nightmare to another. A few weeks ago, I lost my entire database and had to re-add every song. I was knocked down. I got back up and started over again.

So now on to the next thing... Google can be your best friend or your worst nightmare.

For months, I had the idea for an amazing website: a site with all my favorite psychedelic videos and music.

But I couldn't find the great Video CMS to deliver such content! I tried WordPress, Joomla, among many others. It wasn't that these were bad, but the fact that they just weren't allowing me to express myself in the way I wanted to do so. Even tried a free video CMS which I thought would be great, but it just looked too amateur and unprofessional.

I came across some other expensive paid scripts, downloaded trials or cracked versions of them to try them out, only to realize they were just crap or required FFMPEG. Then I came across PHP Melody. I thought about downloading an illegal copy, but no. This script was different. It seemed like there was a lot of effort put into it. It also seemed original.

Hate to say it, but just review some video CMS website. They'll tell you.. many scripts get copied, encrypted, changed a little bit, repackaged, and resold. PHP Melody was easily customizable and allowed me the freedom to express my personality while attracting people with the same music tastes as me. I paid for the script, wanting to keep everything legal, and I was very proud I did that. And the fact is.. none of the code in encrypted. Best yet.. you can contribute ideas, find bugs, and there is a LIVING [FEW] BODIES who are working on always bettering the script. So I'm happy to contribute something to their salary, which isn't even a lot. But I thought it was a good price for what I paid.

They gave me what I want, a great site that is optimized for SEO and is easy to learn.


So... for the past 4 months, I've been building up, advancing my site, making changes to make the script more personal, adding things to my site. Great. It has been a lot of work, but very well worth and I've learned so much. I also keep Google Analytics.

I remember when I began my website.. I was lucky to get 40 visitors a day. It began climbing and climbing the more effort I put into it. I had linked up everything to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace. So much of my site was attracting crazy visitors. The visits and visitors began climbing. Last month, I was receiving 100 visitors a day. I then began studying how to use Twitter. After I learned its use, my website visitors increased from 100 to 250 visitors per day and steadily increasing.

Then something happened last week. There was a straight drop in my visitors. It did not be seem to be possible without something intervening. I checked the status of my site. I checked the IP address. I went to different locations to see if my site was up. Perfect. A little slow in some places, but nothing to defer traffic away.

Google must have punished my website. Here is the picture of my analytics to prove it:




Here is another link to show you just how much traffic dropped from my site:

http://www.updowner.com/youtrippycom/youtrippy.com

30 days change: -3,400 users
90 days change: no change
360 days change: +1,300 users

I did a search of Google punishment and came across Bad Neighborhood linking, so I did a scan.


Keep in mind, my site is psychedelic so words like "drugs", "marijuana", "ecstasy" are on it. This does not mean I encourage drug use. My site also contains the word "nude" because there are songs, such as Radiohead's song, Nude. It was either tagged with a video, or I may have tagged a blog with it because of the topic being discussed. There is no encouragement of drugs on my site. There are no links to pornography on my website. There are no links to gambling websites on my website. I would think Google's bots are smart enough to detect the difference between having words that say "nude" and actual pictures and videos of pornography and other sick twisted stuff on the Internet. Again, this is not what my site is about. I know the content on my site. All of my videos come from YouTube, which usually weeds out all that bad stuff anyway.

Tags & Descriptions. Some of my website does contain descriptive content that is from YouTube such as the Titles and Artist names. Songs also sometimes contain the description of what was on the YouTube site, but again, not all. I know Google likes original content, which is what my blog is for ... each week, I post a new blog about a new music artist. I also have a blog called The Stream in which I post daily rants and pictures and videos and other things. I also have another section that takes some things from YouTube, but hardly anything directly - just the videos.

I do have a link exchange area that is open for anyone to submit their link and I check it often to make sure there are no bad links.

So the first time I ran a Bad Neighborhood Link Check... the only site that seemed very questionable was a link to a website that happened to contain a link to a gambling website. I dropped that link. About 17-20 sites were found when I had done this scan. I did another scan after removing that link. So the results are below this in this post. I'm not sure if it was PHP Melodies tags that got my site punished or not. But 12 links were found. I doubt this is enough to get my site punished.


I love my website. I love PHP Melody. I will keep doing what I am doing. And again, I was knocked down yet again, but I don't stay down. I'll be optimizing my website for Bing and Yahoo searches instead of Google for a while. When Google decides to cut out its bullshit and tell me what I did wrong.. and decides to revoke their punishment on me, then I'll just be catering to 3 search engines, which is good in the long run. Btw, I received no messages in my Webmaster Tools, no email. Google has not notified me about anything.


But in the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions or has been through this situation. Please fill me in on what to do. I appreciate your time reading this and I hope no one ever has to go through it. I also hope someone can help me get out of this hole!




Bad Neighorhood Links:

Total Links found: 2037
Unique Links found: 1660
Questionable Links found: 12
Pages scanned: 40
Scan Queue
1) http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 166 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
2) http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/cli ... eE360M&off erid=78524.10005927&type=3&subid=0
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 1 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 301
3) http://www.youtrippy.com/index.html
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 165 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
4) http://www.youtrippy.com/blog.html
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 207 links found, 3 questionable links found, header returned: 200
5) http://www.youtrippy.com/topvideos.html
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 567 links found, 8 questionable links found, header returned: 200
6) http://www.facebook.com/pages/YouTrippy/201283896578929
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 64 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
7) http://feeds.feedburner.com/youtrippy
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 0 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
8) http://twitter.com/YouTrippy
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 134 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
9) http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/cli ... eE360M&off erid=132481.10000262&type=4&subid=0
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 0 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 302
10) http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 1 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 301
11) http://www.twitter.com/YouTrippy
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 1 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 301
12) http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/cli ... eE360M&off erid=146261.10005941&type=4&subid=0
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 1 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 301
13) http://spn.tw/r7N6C
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 0 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 302
14) http://www.tshirthell.com/store/clicks. ... =YouTrippy
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 0 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 302
15) http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/os-x-lio ... 13?mt=12&p artnerId=30&siteID=9ao6meE360M-_7IIBRmHH3H5m_ZT6k4rXA
Found on: click.linksynergy.com
Scanned: 0 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 301
16) http://www.moby.com/
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 22 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
17) http://matisyahuworld.com/
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 0 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 302
18) http://www.vibrasphere.com/
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 2 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
19) http://www.myspace.com/vibraspheremusic
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 149 links found, 1 questionable links found, header returned: 200
20) http://www.discogs.com/artist/Vibrasphere
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 138 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
21) http://www.thedoghousediaries.com/
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com
Scanned: 1 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 302
22) http://www.facebook.com/
Found on: http://www.facebook.com
Scanned: 29 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
23) http://www.facebook.com/recover.php
Found on: http://www.facebook.com
Scanned: 0 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 302
24) http://developers.facebook.com/?ref=pf
Found on: http://www.facebook.com
Scanned: 22 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
25) http://yt.youtrippy.com/sjcalidream
Found on: http://www.facebook.com
Scanned: 0 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 302
26) http://yt.youtrippy.com/evanosunshine
Found on: http://www.facebook.com
Scanned: 0 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 302
27) http://yt.youtrippy.com/moby
Found on: http://www.facebook.com
Scanned: 0 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 302
28) http://m.twitter.com/
Found on: twitter.com
Scanned: 1 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 302
29) http://twitter.com/
Found on: twitter.com
Scanned: 18 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
30) http://twitter.com/login
Found on: twitter.com
Scanned: 16 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
31) http://t.co/50TQAxN1
Found on: twitter.com
Scanned: 0 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 301
32) http://www.ajaymatharu.com/
Found on: twitter.com
Scanned: 96 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
33) http://t.co/0DY5dsYd
Found on: twitter.com
Scanned: 0 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 301
34) http://t.co/Jes6bIq0
Found on: twitter.com
Scanned: 0 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 301
35) http://www.sponsoredtweets.com/
Found on: twitter.com
Scanned: 1 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 301
36) http://twitterfeed.com/
Found on: twitter.com
Scanned: 11 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
37) http://blog.twitter.com/
Found on: twitter.com
Scanned: 191 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
38) http://status.twitter.com/
Found on: twitter.com
Scanned: 12 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
39) http://dev.twitter.com/
Found on: twitter.com
Scanned: 1 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 301
40) http://support.twitter.com/
Found on: twitter.com
Scanned: 20 links found, 0 questionable links found, header returned: 200
Questionable:
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com/blog.html
URL: http://www.youtrippy.com/articles/browse-drugs-1.html
Anchor text: Drugs
Questionable:
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com/blog.html
URL: http://www.youtrippy.com/articles/tag/r ... be/page-1/
Anchor text: Radiohead Creep OK Computer Paranoid Android Rainbow Jigsaw Falling Into Place Nude Kid Everything In Its RIght Place Videotape Subterranean Home Sickness House Of Cards How To Disappear And Never Be Found Again Pyramid Song Lucky Suprises
Questionable:
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com/blog.html
URL: http://www.youtrippy.com/articles/tag/i ... ad/page-1/
Anchor text: iDoser iDose iDosing Dosing Drugs iPod Mp3 High Music Brain Meditation Activity Technology Mind Focus Concentration Listening Psychedelic Trippy Happy Euphoria Effects Heroine Ecstasy LSD Marijuana Addiction Disorinetation Fun Experience Hertz Relax Thoug
Questionable:
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com/topvideos.html
URL: http://www.youtrippy.com/woody-allen/ev ... 49971.html
Anchor text:
Questionable:
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com/topvideos.html
URL: http://www.youtrippy.com/infected-mushr ... 5ec4e.html
Anchor text:
Questionable:
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com/topvideos.html
URL: http://www.youtrippy.com/tryambaka/hd-s ... 40703.html
Anchor text:
Questionable:
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com/topvideos.html
URL: http://www.youtrippy.com/radiohead/nude ... 37450.html
Anchor text:
Questionable:
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com/topvideos.html
URL: http://www.youtrippy.com/radiohead/nude ... 7cf14.html
Anchor text:
Questionable:
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com/topvideos.html
URL: http://www.youtrippy.com/radiohead-tran ... 47314.html
Anchor text:
Questionable:
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com/topvideos.html
URL: http://www.youtrippy.com/radiohead/nude ... 1a659.html
Anchor text:
Questionable:
Found on: http://www.youtrippy.com/topvideos.html
URL: http://www.youtrippy.com/kings-of-leon/ ... e6619.html
Anchor text:
Questionable:
Found on: http://www.myspace.com/vibraspheremusic
URL: http://www.myspace.com/everything/artic ... spl_footer
Anchor text: LiLo Goes Nude for PB?

[praveen]

To be honest i did not read fully, but i did read enough to see the drop has coincided with a panda update that happened.

maybe your site was affected wrongly. To start off with, post your site details in the official thread they have in Google Groups for panda related hits.

At this juncture it is quite difficult to pinpoint one single reason (or be specific) for this, but there is no harm in checking with G

[dhunt]

Panda may very well be the reason. It's affected mine as well. The Vid sites have all been hit unless you are owned by Google.

It appears that they pure content sites are doing better under panda as compared to the entertainment non content sites. The secret may very well lie in the expanding of articles.

[brownbloodz]

I got penalized around the same time as well. I posted my site on the Google webmaster forum on the second day and couple of users posted links to FAQ: Duplicate Content. You might get the same or similar reply as well if you post your URL in their forums.

I checked some of your videos and you either got one word description or same description as the original Youtube video. You might want to rewrite titles and put in your own description.

[muzikia]

You are right
We reached to the same conclusion.

Therefore on our production websites we have lyrics and artist bio or the combined information from the movie websites, if it the case

[Xarex]

I will eliminate the YouTube descriptions. Always something to do. I understand where Google might not like that. Definitely just hope you don't get penalized for having videos. I admit that I took advantage of that option for quite a few videos. And I had ignored the heeded warning of doing that. Guess I ultimately paid the price for it. But at least my site was not banned from Google.

But I still won't retract my statement in saying that Google is a bully with Panda. The fact is: You get hit without warning. At least a warning with 1 or 2 weeks notice that if you do nothing about cleaning up your act, then you will face a penalty. It's not like Google doesn't have the bots and the technology to do such a thing.

[Trace]

Google WILL hit you if you have duplicate content or content that they consider unoriginal.
Panda hit me several times (usually it was up/down every few weeks).

However the first thing I thought of is that losing your database made you lose all your URLs and built up links.
Google hates that.
If they try to index your site and discover that 90% of your pages don't exist anymore (all your old videos will give an error since they have a different unique ID) your ratings will drop significantly. I rebuilt my site in summer 2010 and the errors of 'page not found' kept showing up till the first quarter of this year.

I don't see any drops in my site visitors on Oct 19th btw. Maybe i was 'lucky'.

[Xarex]

This could be Trace, but after I lost my db, I was sure to update my sitemap.xml as soon as possible. I'd think that if Google finds a mass number of links non-existing, the first thing it would do is go back to the sitemap.xml to see why these pages don't exist.

In Webmaster Tools, I did see the Not Found (7,000+), but I also saw that it found the new links too.

I've eliminated all my descriptions but kept the tags.

I also wonder, if duplicate content counts as those videos as well. If that's the case, than it sucks because video CMS sites now suffer. And there is still that uniqueness in PHP Melody sites and other Video CMS that sets us apart from YouTube and other video hosting sites: The fact that on those sites, you have to go searching for content. PHP Melody offers us the opportunity to categorize and specialize in different areas that cater to people. Such as your site.. you offer a ton of Documentaries .. stuff no one would have any clue about otherwise when it comes to searching on Google, YouTube, or whatever. That is the uniqueness of your site.

But that is pretty much all I can do until I get another crawl or judgement from Google. Aside from optimizing my website for Yahoo & Bing searches. While that may not bring in as much traffic as Google, it's still traffic.

[Trace]

Well, Google doesn't 'like' changes.
It doesn't like it if 90% of the pages disappear, and neither if all of the sudden you have hundreds of new pages at your site.

I don't think Panda looks at video content (yet).

What i'd do if I were you is submit your website for reconsideration and explain that you lost your full DB so all old pages are invalid etc.

[Xarex]

An update on this issue and I'm pre-maturely sending this before getting an answer with Trace via email.

I believe Trace was correct. But what happened was.. I was adding multiple videos. URLs can be different. But you can have the same exact meta title and description. PHP Melody allows this but will not allow duplicate URL entries.

When you go to add that video, a URL is generated. The URL might contain the title but a different random generated ID. The meta title is what Google is reading as a duplicate.

I checked my Webmaster Tools and under HTML Suggestions. there were over 7,000 duplicates in there. Google definitely is not having this. And that's why my site must have received a penalty.

An example is this:

Code: Select all

/carbon-based-lifeforms/transmissionintermission-video_37a728d00.html
/carbon-based-lifeforms/transmissionintermission-video_6579e4428.html

/jethro-tull/locomotive-breath-video_585b21bff.html
/jethro-tull/locomotive-breath-video_98b9f495a.html
/jethro-tull/locomotive-breath-video_abcff4faf.html
/jethro-tull/locomotive-breath-video_f5e9795ec.html

In order to fix this and eliminate all duplicate entries in the database, I had to figure out how to do this without doing so much work, or starting from scratch. I backed up my database tables with each SQL statement I performed, just in case I needed to restore anything.

PHP Melody is a great tool and does exactly what it should. It had been my fault for adding duplicate titles. Descriptions were all different, but titles were definitely the same.

Here is the SQL code I used, in case anyone is curious. Please use these at your own risk. BACKUP YOUR DATA BEFORE EXECUTING THE DELETE STATEMENTS.


List all duplicate entries:

Code: Select all

Select video_title, COUNT(*) TotalCount
FROM pm_videos
GROUP BY video_title
HAVING COUNT(*) > 1
ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC

Delete All Duplicate Titles:

Code: Select all

delete from pm_videos where video_title in (select x.video_title from (select video_title from pm_videos group by video_title having count(*) > 1) as x)

After you have removed all the duplicates titles in the pm_videos, you need to remove their URLs.

Code: Select all

DELETE FROM pm_videos_urls WHERE uniq_id NOT IN (SELECT uniq_id FROM pm_videos);

Also, I'm sure keeping tag words are fine, but you should eliminate the description that is imported from YouTube. To do this, you can use this SQL query:

Code: Select all

update pm_videos set description = null

[Andrew]

Such valuable info. Thanks for sharing all this Xarex!

Hopefully as many people as possible see this. Duplicate titles should definitely be avoided at all costs.

[topmp3ad]

I have same trafic in google analytics like XEREX + pagerank from 3 to 1
I send Reconsideration Request to google.
And masage from Google is....


Hello,

We’ve reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmaster ... er=35769#3. These guidelines outline illicit practices which may lead Google to take action on a site in order to keep webspam out of search results. In addition to this email, you may also receive a notification in Webmaster Tools regarding the outcome of your reconsideration request.

Specifically, we detected pages on your site which do not provide substantially unique content or added value. Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not add value for your users unless your site provides additional useful services or content. Sites lacking organic content can create a frustrating user experience for our searchers as well as the site’s visitors, and can lead to a lack of diversity in the search results. You can find more information on sites with little or no original content here: http://www.google.com/support/webmaster ... swer=66361.

As an example from your site, http://www.top-mp3.com/articles/read-to ... 40_63.html, appears to be scraped from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_40.

It's worth your time to create original content that sets your site apart. This should keep your visitors coming back to your site and improve the usefulness of search results.

If you’d like more specific advice for your site, consider posting in our Webmaster Help Forum, where a community of webmasters may be able to assist you and point out site issues you may have overlooked. You can post to the forum here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en.

Please correct or remove all content that is outside our quality guidelines. Once you have updated your site, reply to this email noting the specific changes you made.

Sincerely,

The Google Search Quality Team



This means you can embed video from you tube, where appropriate Article of the Internet but we also need to own a lot of articles.How to solve the rest of you?Duplicity content e.t.c.

[Xarex]

Interesting. I never did receive a penalty from Panda. It was simply a Googlebot penalty. When their bots detect duplicate pages, they don't crawl through them as much. My site went from having bots crawl on it up to 20,000 times per day to having no bots on it at all.


It seems they detected some things on your site. Did you copy them and paste them? That would certainly bring about a penalty. All my articles I write on my own and any blogs are also written from the scratch of my own mind.

I suppose there is a big different in the eyes of the Google bot between having duplicate pages vs. duplicate content.

Follow the instructions of this post. They will guide you.


And just keep writing your own articles. Do all you can to publish at least one article a week or so. Have original content that can't be found anywhere else. Submit another reconsideration in about a month or three.

Keep your sitemap up to date and without duplicate content. Tags are okay, but that's why I provided the command to erase the description. Hopefully a future feature in PHP Melody - import tags but not descriptions.

I noticed that when I posted articles with good keywords, I was getting readers. So after a month of almost nothing, between 20-40 vistors a day, I kept posting articles as I normally would -- all original and written by me, cleaned up my site, added more videos, but made sure there was no dupes, kept updating my sitemap.xml file, and pinged googlebot to recrawl it when I was ready. A few times, because it took a while to fix my mistakes. Visitors seem to be rising again.

A look into Google Webmaster (after a resubmission of my URL and a googlebot fetch), I went from 3,000+ duplicate videos down to 1,643. Getting there. This is the message displayed on the top of the webmaster page: When Googlebot crawled your site, it found some issues with your content. These issues won't prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but addressing them may help your site's user experience and performance.

Stop focusing on traffic and analytics for a while and your visitors will come back. Build up quality content rather than quantity. You have a good domain name. Use it to your advantage.

PHP Melody is definitely amazing for SEO. Andrew and the team did a wonderful job where it seems most bots have no trouble getting through the site at all. So use that to your advantage, especially with writing articles and using tags.

[topmp3ad]

I agree absolutely - Thank you Xarex