Don’t anger the Google gods.
That’s the lesson Paul Sanar learned–too late–last year. Up until last fall, the 21-year-old New Yorker depended solely on the search engine to keep traffic flowing to Skyfacet.com, his online diamond business; Sanar says he sold $3 million dollars worth of jewelry a year. Then, he says, Google turned its back on Skyfacet.com, condemning the site to Internet obscurity.
Beginning in September 2006, Skyfacet no longer showed up on the first few pages of Google’s results when users typed in search terms like “diamonds” and “engagement ring.” The site’s traffic vanished, and Sanar says his sales dropped $500,000 in three months.
What happened? Sanar isn’t completely sure. But he does know that his site has been condemned to the supplemental index, a dreaded backwater region of Google search results that goes by another name in online marketing circles: Google Hell.
Google Hell is the worst fear of the untold numbers of companies that depend on search results to keep their business visible online. Getting stuck there means most users will never see the site, or at least many of the site’s pages, when they enter certain keywords. And getting out can be next to impossible–because site operators often don’t know what they did to get placed there.
Photo by Google.
affiliate on May 9th, 2007 at 6:38 am
It seems that everyone should be afraid to get most of traffic from one source, neither it Google Search Engine or something else. And of course, if you are in popular keywords top ten of Google SERP you should pray your business not to be ruined by Google algorithm change.