Live by the Google, die by the Google

Martin Krohn is a fellow webmaster and ex-tech site owner. He is the owner of I Am Not A Geek (IANAG). Back in the day, IANAG did computer hardware reviews and technology articles, just like The TechZone. One day Martin got bored of reviewing the latest and greatest computer hardware and decided to turn IANAG into a Windows utilities and anti-spyware download site, because it required no work. Using top secret SEO techniques that I am not allow to disclose, Martin got IANAG to index extremely well on Google for a bunch of Windows utility and spyware keywords. Google was sending enough traffic for Martin to make $1,000 a day off the site. Martin brought a new car, a boat, two jet skis and was looking to buy a new house.

Then one day, Google decided that Martin was getting a little corky with his SEO and handed him a huge bitch slap by de-indexing most of his site. Almost overnight, Martin’s income went from $1,000 a day to less than $70! That’s was when I gave him my now famous quote “Live by the Google, die by the Google!”

You can never keep a good Dot Com down for long. Google had handed Martin a really sour lemon. Martin went to work turning it into lemonade. First he moved all the content of IANAG to a new domain call Network Techs and worked on getting the content re-indexed. Then he turned IANAG into an online arcade site running Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads. Martin’s choice of running Yahoo was not to get even with Google. Yahoo just paid better for arcade sites.

Why am I telling this story now? Well, today I got an IM from Martin with a screen shot to his YPN earnings from March 10th to April 10th. It looks like he has done a good job turning around IANAG. He tells me his Network Techs site is also doing very well and Google has re-indexed most of the pages, but they’re not placed as high as they use to be. So far Martin has managed to regain half of his pre-bitch slap monthly internet income.

That almost puts him back in Dot Com Mogul territory.

 

Oh, Martin is doing good eh.

 

Interesting story Yes, it is not easy to work with google anymore.

 

One of the lessons here is to maintain more than one profitable web site.

Google seems to be pretty good at only losing one of my really profitable web sites at a time.

 

Google is like a GF...it is nice to you until you've given it your heart and sole and then it stabs you in the back.

Yes, I have issues, lol

 

Why didn't Martin just wait it out to see if he would appear back in the index instead of the knee-jerk reaction and then transferring all of the content on to a new domain? It seems very strange Martin would do this.

Pete

 

All this tells me that I should not let google take control of my sites, you know why?

lately google was forcing webmasters to have specific sitemaps in order for your website to be crawled, then they decided to change the sitemap style, then they decided to have a PR for the sites, etc.

they want to control the internet, and now we are the ones who need to decide, go for goolge or no, lets go for something else....???....

 

It's good not to have all your eggs in one basket Do not rely solely on google (if you can) and setup multiple adsense accounts as well.

 

You mean using adsense on several sites or having SEVERAL adsense logins?
Because the later is against the Adsense TOS IIRC.

Regards,
Ludo

 

You are allowed to have several AdSense accounts, if each is tied to a different tax id.

 

Before google showed up, I was taught, and so were all other webmasters, one simple rule.
PROMOTE YOUR SITE FOR VISITORS!

Today, it seems too many webmasters do not follow that simple rule.
Instead they use every trick (legal and not) to get traffic only from google.

I do not care about page rank (except for selling advertising or selling a site, then it is nice to note so that everyone who cares about page rank will be so damn happy), I do not care about my google listings, and I do not worry about whether I get visitors from google.

I promote my sites and get my visitors from all over the place...newsletters, other sites, and so forth.

So, as the original title of this thread says:
Live by google, die by google
And those who really believe google is the end-all and be-all for traffic,
will die...
LOL