SEOmoz | Widgetbait Gone Wild
Matthew Inman (Oatmeal) from SEOmoz.org just posted a great article about Google Widget Link Spam and some other negative Google index penalties that he has experienced over the past year at JustSayHi.
Some of you might remember I left SEOmoz last year to join up with JustSayHi with the intention of creating the world’s biggest, baddest free online dating site. Using these quizzes, I had a creative way to rank our site for competitive keywords in an industry that is primarily dominated by paid links, directory spam, and other greyish-black SEO tactics. We ranked #1 for online dating, free online dating, and numerous other very competitive terms. We were averaging over 2,000 new members a day and passed the 500,000 member mark.
Oops.
Shortly thereafter, we made a godzilla-turd-sized mistake. JustSayHi’s parent company, Next Internet, acquired a bunch of payday loan and education lead-gen websites (around Q4 2007) which are among the hundreds of domains in their portfolio.
This is a great piece on the way you can attempt to be ‘white hat’ and still make simple albeit small mistakes that can land you right back in the Google penalty box. Matthew details the road he navigated (including working one on one with Matt Cutts) and how he is trying to regain his rankings and site reputation.
Check out the rest of Matthews ‘Widget Bait Gone Wild’ article here at SEOmoz.org
By Jeremy Hermanns | April 15, 2008 | Filed Under New Technology, SEO Advice
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