IMPORTANT: Do NOT read any of the following without first watching this clip:

Get out of Jail Free

If you don’t know, the above clip is from the movie Shawshank Redemption, and for some reason every time I think about the topic of re-applying for something online that clip comes to mind. Try and map the discussion in that video to your own mistakes as a webmaster. If you watch it directly on YouTube you can see some annotations throughout.

I’ve Been Dreading Today

I guess my connection to that video really connects to my views on the whole DMOZ Open Directory. Ever since we were de-listed in ‘04 for no reason, I’ve been reapplying politely once a year, and every year I hear nothing back. Like Morgan Freeman, I no longer give a shit about DMOZ.

Unlike DMOZ, I’m more optimistic about reapplying to Google. In the beginning, Google was our number one source of traffic and my number one favorite partner. We had access to a dedicated account rep to bounce Adsense ideas off, got a ton of ‘long-tail’ keyword search queries, and built our main page PageRank up to 7.
Over the last couple years we’ve grown our business purchased sites and rolled them into this one, gone through a few redesigns, and brought on new ad partners. One particular service we experimented with last year was Text-Link-Ads. Since joining we’ve seen our PageRank slide all the way down to 4, and search referral traffic from Google has been dismal:

Scrap Paid Text Links

It’s pretty clear that these text link ads have been a key factor in our demise. Logically we’ve been looking for a way to eliminate with the intent of applying to Google for reconsideration/re-inclusion and I’m happy (and sad) to say we’ve canceled the account. We’ll miss the money but it’s worth it if we can get traffic back up again from search referrals.

Our Reconsideration Letter

Here’s a copy of what I sent to Google if you’re interested:

Greetings,

I am writing to you to request reconsideration for the domain WhyDoWork.com.

We have seen our root level PageRank slide from 7-4 over the past 18 months, and I’m confident we have cleaned up any possible violations through the following actions:

- canceled our premium partner account at text-link-ads.com and removed associated text links
- applied ‘nofollow’ to all paid advertiser links
- applied ‘nofollow’ to all previously sponsored blog posts
- removed conflicting packages from our advertising options (http://www.whydowork.com/advertise.php)

I am confident that we are no longer in violation of Google’s Webmaster Terms & Conditions, and we will work to continue to maintain our good standing.

Thanks!
Matthew Rivard

Note: We have recently merged two of our sites (bloggingmix.com and shylockblogging.com) into whydowork.com through 301 redirection to explain increased backlinks to our whydowork.com/blog.

‘NoFollow’ any Paid Links in Posts

On top of eliminating all text link ads, I’ve gone through old blog posts (from sites we’ve acquired that did paid reviews) and applied the ‘nofollow’ directive to all posts that were sponsored. That activity also ensures that you’re not passing PageRank through paid links in any content you produce. Another idea touching on this is to update your advertisement sales page to let buyers know that all reviews will have ‘nofollow’ applied to external links.

Explain Rapid Growth and Increases in Backlinks

One of our other struggles which I’m unsure there’s a solution for is the massive influx in links we have as a result of purchasing smaller blogs and incorporating their content with ours. This is something I’m unclear on, but note that I mentioned it in my reconsideration letter to Google as blog PageRank has gone from 5 to nothing in a few weeks, I suspect because of the influx in links. I doubt Google can recognize that our growth is legit, so I’d bet we’ve probably been slapped with a sandbox penalty for growing too quickly.

What Do You Think?

In general this topic has already been beaten to death by a number of bloggers. I just really wanted to share that video clip to see if anyone else sees the similarities . Andy Beard presented Google with a lengthy letter regarding his robots.txt strategy and the effective use of nofollow. He also showed that using robots.txt didn’t have too much of an impact on search traffic.
Courtney Tuttle’s post on the topic was a recommended read by one of our members Trent and I’m glad I read it; it really helped validate why were doing it. Darren Rowse also had some useful insights on the topic, but I don’t think we’re in a position where we can forget about PageRank given the lameness of search referrals from them. In the spirit of making demands, I’d also like to hear from Matt Cutt’s, Google’s primo public ‘SEO guy’ and head of the Webspam team.

I’m hoping that our recent changes, and the cleverness of my association via an old movie clip will be enough to get some Google love back. I suppose only time will tell!

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