I imagine that Googlebot must be some what confused with my blog lately, since it is not welcomed here while inbound links continue to grow.
The most recent page rank reduction, that hit heavily Malaysian bloggers, tells me that Google employees in charge of the “punishing stick” must be as confused as their little bot. There is no doubt in my mid that penalties are carried out manually, and I think that for the most part on a random basis, although there are claims that Google targets blogs based on certain keywords.
Since I have made certain prediction I shall begin by analyzing those predictions. I am happy to say that I have been proven wrong in everything I have predicted. You should take my findings with a grain of salt since my experiment is only 12 days old.
I have predited decrease a 30% loss of traffic to my blog. I probably could have turn out to be a correct prediction, but after my original article where I announced the Googleban had been sphan, stumbled and link to from bloggers with a huge traffic, I have actually seen an increase of traffic by at least 40% comparing to the 12 days preceding my experiment.
Since my website was about to removed from Google index, I have predicted a considerable decrease in the amount of spam. The simple digest report by Spam Karma 2 indicates otherwise. To my amazement the amount of spam (both human and generated by bots) almost tripled. I guess Google can take this as a compliment.
I predicted that bloggers, especially those unfamiliar with my blog, would hesitate to link to me since there will be no trace of my site in Google index- thus potentially indicate of my blog not being safe to link to. To my surprise I received links from blogs that have never linked to me in the past. And of course I am thankful to all those who linked to me out of solidarity.
When I have restricted the Googlebot from this website, I did not know that the penalties where yet to come. My Web Hosting Review Blog’s page rank is reduced to 0 from 2. It was reduced from PR3 to PR2 in the previous round. The interesting thing about that blog is that there is not a single sponsored review on that blog. Although that blog was listed in ReviewMe, Sponsored Reviews and TLA. I have similar websites that were not listed there and those have seen an increase of page rank, although they have nothing but affiliate datafeeds in them. Since few of these websites where listed in Google Sitemaps, it does not appear that Google is penalizing websites across the Sitemaps accounts. They do it manually and many I add they do a terrible job detecting which websites deserves the penalty and in the short term potentially hurting smaller bloggers and leaving the biggest offenders untouched.
It may be way to early to draw any conclusions from my experiment. For now I am just saying to simply not to trust Google. If you write good content and are working on growing your subscribers number you may very well survive without Google. More updates on the way.
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Few days ago it was Google - today it is Microsoft. I have been running Ubuntu on my PCs for a few months. On my desktop Ubuntu is the only OS, however my laptop currently can run Windows and two versions of Ubuntu.
The only reason I was hanging onto Windows was the Widnows Movie Maker. However today or maybe yesterday, Microsoft did something that pushed my patience to its limit. Evidently the most recent Microfots update pack screwed the GRUB and I am no longer able to choose my OS on startup. I am sure there is a way to correct this but instead I went on and tried to take a closer look at Kino- the Linux video editor.
What I have discovered surprised me:
Kino is as good as the Microsoft Movie Maker. Actually it may be even better.
Kino integrates perfectly with Blip.tv.
Bye bye Windows!
Update: After writing this post I came across Dan Dennedy’s Blog- a must read blog if you have chosen Kino as your video editing software.
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No? What about a new start up? Wish us luck! The video bellow is of my wife making a fondant cake. I am not sure why people go so crazy about these sort of cakes. It taste terrible. Unfortunately my wife did not tell me that no one eats fondant. Oh well.
If you browser allows for a any tool bar that shows you Google PR, you may have noticed that there is no green (or whatever other color might be used) in that little bar. I have expected that to happened and am just a little bit surprised by a slight delay between the time my website began to disappear from Google’s index to the time when PR went down to 0. I would suspect these things would happen simultaneously.
So, I guess every one should congratulate me now on my new milestone while saying goodbye to Google. My experiment is turning into a very interesting adventure and the more hours pass by the more I realize that you do not need Google at all today to market your website and that the social media websites along with the RSS technology constitute the biggest threat to Google, as well as to other search engines. They (the search engines) should be working very hard on some sort of kick ass technology in order to survive in the business. I am not a prophet but if you are an investor you should think twice whether or not to hold on to a stock of some companies even if they trade $800 a share. You do not need a crystal ball to see that some companies will be struggle for survival even though they may be soaring high today.
“Build your websites as if there were no search engines”- you’ve probably heard this slogan many times. Now you can hear it from me, now that I am experiencing it in a more realistic way- “Do yourself a favor and build your websites as if there were no search engines!”
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As a former real estate agent I found the clip below extremely entertaining. I wonder if Vanessa Fox finds it funny as well? Or maybe there is a reason that she left Google for Zillow?
If you are a real estate agent and are familiar with Zillow’s “zestimates” you may understand that a possible “Google Real Estate” is a perfect recipe for disaster. Anyway, here is the clip from Home Rental Blog:
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It has been only 12 hours since I have instructed Googlebot to ignore my website, while at the same time removing my website from Google index. And I am extremely impressed by the quickness and effectiveness Google responded to my commands/requests. There is hardly any evidence of my website in the Google index if you search “site:www.volodymyrzablotskyy.com“. The best part of it all is that I ma here bragging about it! Few months ago such an event as getting kicked out of the Google index would send me into a panic, today it feels liberating.
Interesting thing is that blocking Googlebot via robots.txt will not exclude your blog from Google Blog Search. Although this entire experiment is meant to test how a blog would survive without Google, I am not concerned with Google Blog Search since it never sent my way any traffic in the past.
It is too son to evaluate the predictions I have made in my previous post. It is too soon to judge about loss of traffic in fact today have experience a 500% increase of traffic thanks to StumbleUpon, Sphinn, BumpZee and other social websites. The last SK2 notification indicated that there were 42 spam comments attempted in the last 8 hours. I do believe that much of the automated spam will decrease. I think I may also have been mistaken about other bloggers willingness to link to my blog, it remains to be seen if incoming links will continue to come in when the bloggers will not be able to find my blog in the index. Andy has mentioned that he considers me a founder and will not remove my blog from DoFollow community, since I am not blocking Yahoo and MSN bots. To be honest I never understood if Yahoo and MSN paid any attention to “nofollow” tag.
In conclusion I have to say that my first 12 hours without Google are quiet successful. But I still would discourage to follow my example, because it is as much foolish as it is daring.
The unfortunate side of this experiment is that I failed to write about my my trip to North Carolina and meeting with John Nardollili, my account rep from Link Connector. Meeting with John was one of the highlights of my trip and I will write about it soon. Meanwhile make sure to check out Link Connector. They have some very cool merchants in their network. Many of their merchants offer free access to product data feeds.
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Update: This experiment is over. Google is back crawling my website. Google wins.
One of the great benefits coming from as weird URL as you see for this blog, that I will have extremely hard time to ever sell it. With that there is also one particular advantage- I can experiment more with my website than other bloggers. Even if my experiments are a little drastic or insane.
Having been defamed by Google, along with many other bloggers, gave me an opportunity to reevaluate my relationship with big G. I have decided to see how will this blog survive on its own- without Google. So I have instructed Googlebot to stay way from this blog. But I also have requested to remove my entire website from Google’s index via Google Webmaster Tools (formerly know as Google Sitemaps).
Why so drastic?
Well, as I said it is an experiment. And I would advise not to follow my example if you run a blog that is responsible for good chunk of your earnings. Otherwise you are likely to loose about 30% of existing traffic and potentially that can translate into a loss of considerable amount of your income.
I would not call it an attempt to boycott Google. However, since Google has considered some of the pages to be shown on the first page of its search results, removing my website from these results is a way of returning the kindness after being defamed by their most recent Page Rank update.
Is it all about paid links and nofollow?
Yes and no. Yes I am guilty. My guilt amounts to about $2,000 earned from sponsored reviews and text link ads during the course of last year. Even I if I can’t substantiate a claim that I did not intentionally sell Page Rank, I still believe that a “no-nofollow” link to an advertiser from my blog did not have the same effect on SERPs as a “no-nofollow” link to an advertiser let say on TechChrunch or a “no-nofollow” link to his employer by Matt Cutts.
I still believe that paid reviews and paid links can contribute to better and more relevant results. To claim that links are irrelevant just because they are found in a sponsored review is absurd.
Could there have been a more moderate way out?
In order to make peace with Google, many webmasters were forced into waving white flags in surrender. I believe that similar option was available to me also. However seeing how uneven and unjust penalties were distributed, I have decided to give Google a hand. Even though I received money in exchange for links, my conscious is clean. When my website will be removed from Google’s index, any claim that I am selling Page Rank is absurd.
On the other had this will give me a better understanding whether or not a website can be successful or even survive without being indexed in Google. I will be posting some statistics in the future on it so stay tuned.
Although the readership of this blog is low, the fact that people subscribe to my blog tells me that once in a while I manage to write something relevant and interesting and no search engine will tell me otherwise.
Here is just few predictions about the effects this will have on my blog:
I will lose about 30% of traffic- not a big deal if I manage to increase the subscribers to this blog.
I predict a considerable decrease of spam (both human and automated) on my blog. It will be interesting to see to what degree was Google at fault when it came to spam.
I imagine bloggers may hesitate to link to me since there will be no sign of my website in Google- this will result in a smaller number of links in the future to my blog. Will this turn my blog into a “bad neighborhood”? Frankly in this light the entire idea of “bad neighborhood” is absurd- without Google it does not exist.
I may loose my place in the “Dofollow Movement” even though I am keeping DoFollow plugin on my blog.
I know that many of you disagree with my approach, I do however want to hear your take on it. How do you think my blog will do?
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November 19, 2007 
Posted by Vlad in Other (Fom Old Blog)
