If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Open Ads - Open Source Ad Inventory Management
The Big List of Affiliate Marketing Events
Secret To Get On The First Page Of Google

David Airey recently blogged about losing his first page rankings for certain key phrases that brought him 30% of his blog traffic from Google searches. He used to rank on the first two pages for his name and terms like “logo designer” which is his craft. Now the question is what caused Google to penalize his search rankings. He thinks that it’s because of some paid links that he has on his site but frankly, I think that it might be related to the contest that he was running a month ago.

When I wrote about the benefits of running a contest to increase traffic to a blog, I did add a warning which I’ll highlight again:

“The more blogs related to your topic linking back to you with one way links, the more authoritative your blog appears to the search engines. You can also specify the link text to be used in your contest rules. But this may seem unnatural if all of a sudden, you’re getting all these links within a short period of time with the exact same anchor text. It might appear spammy to some search engines.”

Although David did not specify the anchor text to be used to link back to his blog, his rules for the contest can be seen to be encouraging people to link to his blog. Here’s part of the rules:

“Get one entry by blogging about the draw. Write a blog post telling your readers about the prize giveaway and you’ll get one entry. You can describe the draw in any way you like. For every 5 prize sponsors you link to (they’re all listed above), you’ll get 1 extra entry into the draw.”

I think Google saw this as an effort to manipulate the search results and penalized him for it. This can serve as a word of caution for those who are considering running similar contests. The rule is not to make anything look unnatural. What happened with David’s contest is that many bloggers were lazy and just copied his entire post verbatim with all the links included. So it’s not difficult to trace the posts back to the source.

There is further evidence supporting my theory. You may have heard of how John Chow lost all his rankings for his blog by running this linkback contest.

It’s unlikely that Google is penalizing webmasters for selling advertising, be they paid links or banner ads. If that’s the case, lots of popular sites would get the boot too.

So the bottom line is, if you like the traffic you’re getting from the Google SERPS, play by the big G’s rules.

Technorati Tags: Google rankings, linking contest, penalized by Google, David Airey

Popularity: 4% [?]