I was going for a walk here in OHIO and found a shop with words “This shop is powered by google search”, Its a real estate company which occupies top spot in Google's rankings. it now brings us to the question why should someone display such a banner in front of their shop? Is it advertisement for Google ? or Is it a fashion? I think its more to do with gratitude.
There are too many companies in the web world which rely solely on google search and Google adsense programs.Many websites might fall if Google decides to take them for a ride(I know they won't 🙂 ). “Every possible site exists in Google search database” and you can reframe the sentence “A site exists only if it is in Google search”, that is how much Google has control over the search engine market.
Its not the control and market dominance which fascinates me, rather its the perfection or finesse with which it accomplishes the task.Over the last few years I have been involved with googlebot (my favorite word is the google serpent) in many ways.It has taken nearly 2-3 years for me to understand the efficiency and presence of googlebot.Its fast,it crawls every thing and it punishes harshly whenever junk is thrown at it.
Sometime back when the SEO comapnies started out spreading their wings everybody was wondering whether SEO's will rule the roost.But Googlebot proved them wrong pretty soon, any tactic to get a better rank had improvements in the short term but the cost? Many sites were blocked/punished, they were simply thrown to last pages of search results.
So how good and how receptive is googlebot ? I did a little research on one of my site(or rather a mistake), I tried to pass some keywords which will give me a better ad revenues, though the keywords were not totally off topic for my site but they were itly for content not present in my site. Within a few days my site's search visitors reduced, and to my astonishment(shock) site appeared exactly in 41/42 nd position for the same keyword which I had first five places in search rankings earlier.
So is it the -40 filter? I guess so and it responded pretty quickly for my liking.It responded pretty fast to my keyword seeding / keyword spawning and the punishment was harsh as well, I lost nearly 80% of my site visitors thanks to the fourth page result. If Google had banned my site or applied -5000 filter or something my site would have become extinct in a day.
Once I removed the keywords it took my site to regain the top spot within a week or two. I should feel pretty lucky to have regained my spot in search rankings.And the search ranking was regained mainly by referrals, which makes us to have a look at reffering sites.
Some people call it Authority sites, if a Site say Hindu.com refers my site for certain Indian news articles my site's ranking will increase, thats because Hindu.com is the top authority site for Indian news. In my case the sites fighting for my keyword also were mine and since they were referring to my first site, it didn take long for me to get back to top spot.But a year back similar misadventure led to closure of my news site, by now I know how to work with googlebot, Dont try to be over smart with googlebot, If your site is really worth it will get a good rank else you will be punished.
I will update more filters and the Google sandbox in a few days. Signup for receiving articles from this site.