This guy reminds me how normal i am in the grand scheme of things:
"I felt discouraged and depressed. I tried to buy myself some fancy clothes and toys to feel better about myself. I immersed myself in a shallow relationship with a model who would end up being Miss Universe China 2014. I took weekly hiking trips with my friends in the hills of Beijing on psychadelic mushrooms."
I only get around 20 (Optimizely, Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, Perfect Audience, Hotjar, a bunch of ptEngine), I think you must also be blocking twimg.com which looks to be Twitter's avatar CDN, and those extra blocks are the attempts to load avatars in the comments.
Interesting. I'm using uBlock Origin with pretty much all 3rd party filters enabled, and only have 19 requests blocked. Would you mind sharing what tools you're using?
Block `twimg.com` and see the count climbing to over 460 -- because of the avatars in the comment section. Personally I block such ubiquitous hostnames by default (using uBO's dynamic filtering), as they are as good as trackers (for Twitter in the current case).
Google is only a proxy to The Internet, nothing more. There's a bucketload of untapped traffic coming from sources Google could only dream of. I found this out by mistake when I had AWStats running for way longer than it should have, and it hoovered up globs of what we would call 'big data' today.
Some of the referal links are still alive today and funneling terrabytes of metadata through their servers; a practice I thought was more or less frowned upon, but still serving SEOs today. Still so much to tap into, still like 2012 too!
Google has been trying to put a damper on linking from your website to another one for years now. My first website in 1996 I developed the first thing I did was go to websites that had similar customers and we would exchange links so our customers would find out about our complimentary services. Now that freaks google out because they prefer everyone to see Google ads when searching so finding websites must be done inside of Google otherwise they threaten you to take you out of Google search.
I never used ALN (Authority Link Network), but I used smaller-tier services. And I ranked well for quite a while in my low-to-medium keywords -- things that I loved, used, and believed in (and still do). Never touched crap like HCG or Acai.
So here's the truth: It took me exactly 3 years to get back to the pre-Penguin traffic levels. Only difference is, this time I've done it with an actual brand and legitimate content: Breaking stories, researching things never heavily-researched, getting quotes from sources, and exposing scams and scandals as well.
Building a small brand is a chore, and we still have tons to do, but it's SO worth it. This isn't some-scumbag-domain.com - it's a real brand that has its own personality, fanbase, and return visitors who regularly come back to read new stuff and use our services. People Google for our brand more every month... We even have our own haters!! That's like the highest honor!
Branding is hard work, but it's FUN. Repeat: it's FUN.
I still get emailed and asked about SEO frequently. My simple advice is this: blow the lid off of something. If none of your content isn't worth real people legitimately sharing... if none of your content isn't worth an experienced user from a niche forum reading it and saying "wow"... then you might as well not even waste your time.
Who needs to build links when you can write (or code) so damn well that people build them for you?! What's better than that?!
Thankfully, when I was doing well, I wasn't stupid with my money. I invested into the future, and was able to handle the downturn without getting a job.
The lessons learned from this:
1. Many entrepreneurs make their most serious money in SHORT bursts of time. No matter what it is, it can dry up, so don't go buying cars just yet. Get financial help from someone who knows what's up (not easy to find)
2. If people aren't searching for YOUR brand name, then you're not doing "SEO" right, or you have ways to go.
3. Despite all this social media stuff, Google still controls some of the most valuable traffic. Don't do things that piss them off!
4. You can have your filler content, but on frequent occasion, you must write full-tilt content like this article here - fresh, insightful, and worth sharing and posting to a number of sites and forums. Otherwise, you don't have a real content strategy. You have a WOMBAT strategy. (Waste Of Money Brains and Time)
5. You can hustle for short-term money, but if you do that, you MUST re-invest it into the long-term game. If you don't, you'll just turn into that old guy spinning and hustling until the day you die. And at that point, you're not an entrepreneur, you're just a hustler.
Dang, maybe I should get back into blogging. So much to say...
Apologies for the long posts chaps, but here's a genuine riddle I'm hoping someone with black hat SEO experience/knowledge can help answer for me:
A quick spot of history: I started my business in 2007. Organic traffic grew steadily until 2012 when I suffered a Penguin penalty that promptly wiped me off the map.
Until that point I had reached a steady 1 or 2 spot in organic rankings for the keywords that exactly described my product and service, which, considering the market I'm in had around 12 competitors (at that time), and considering my site was built for humans, had no keyword stuffing, and so on, felt, well, justified.
At very minimum if you were in the market for what my product did a visit to my site was a great experience. The site was fast, easy to read, well laid out, the product rocked, and so on.
I stress those points as the penalty left me reeling. I had heard about SEO before sure, but considered it a gross exercise in unnatural manipulation -- I would never go down that road. Hell, it took me months to realize I had a "penalty", and then several more to figure out it was from this thing named after an arctic fish.
And yet here I was penalized, and where my question comes in. I have a few small pieces of information that may be relevant.
About a year before my penalty I started a blog covering general product announcements and other items of interest to programmers. These items almost never had links, and if they did, would be directly related to the subject mater. As a concrete example, I wrote a post about learning SSE in assembly, and linked to an Intel blog post on the same subject.
However, I did allow comments on this blog at first, and exactly two times I logged in to find spam comments linking to discount shoes or handbags. These comments were promptly removed, and, after that second time, I disabled comments altogether.
Fast forward two years into the penalty (yes, two years in!). It's mid-2014 and I've been researching what happened. Turns out at the time of my initial penalty I had well over a million "back links" pointing to my site. All were from incredibly shady sites. Chinese language pages with literally hundreds of "form posts", 99% filled with absolute gibberish text. But within that mass of garbage would be a link to my site, the homepage no less, advertising discount Louis Vuitton handbags. The link would generally be along the lines of (broken HTML intentional) href = "formboss.net" > Discount Handbags </a
At first the scam seems obvious: If my site had links pointing to knockoff handbag retailers, then my high Google rank would transfer over...wait...huh?
See, that's where I get stuck. I see the individual pieces, but I cannot piece the scam together in any way that makes scene. The Chinese sites that linked to me, who in the world would be reading those? Further, they linked to my home page. Short of being hacked (which I never was), how would a home page link make sense?
The short-lived links on my blog: Sure, they linked to outside sources, and so conceivably my high rank would valuable, but why the 1,000,000+ inbound links to my site?
That’s the part that keeps me awake at night. The thing I had control over, the outbound links -- Zapped ‘em immediately. The damage clearly came from those inbound links, but they make no sense to me.
I am not a black hat SEO expert by any means, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt. It sounds like you may have been the victim of a negative SEO attack. In short: one of your competitors may have created these millions of spammy links in order to decrease your rankings (and, presumably, raise their own closer to the top). If this is still a site you care about, consider disavowing the spammy links: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
A very solid piece of advice on the disavow links, and very much acted upon a few years ago (of course I still maintain a close watch on links!)
Also, to another reply a bit further down, I actually started fresh with a new domain about 6 months after the initial penalty, and used 301 redirects from the old (penalized) site to the new.
I did this to reduce confusion from my existing users, as their was no reason why they should have to retype or bookmark a new domain name. Sure I was going through a very rough patch, but my users should not have to as well!
I had a simple bit of logic that said if you were coming from the old domain, to pop up a message say hi, we had a name change. Not ideal, but that's the best I could come up with.
Little did I know that the 301 actually transferred the penalty to the new site. Shortly after launching I was hit with a second penalty, and the thought of having to change domain names again was just...it's just wrong. The inconvenience and confusion this creates for users is still being felt to this day. I routinely get emails from users of the first domain asking if I'm the same company.
So yeah, I've been trying here, but my lucks been pretty bad : )
Somewhat related, can anyone explain this Twitter account[1] to me? I stumbled across it about a week ago. It appears to be a bot that copied some of my (and others') HN posts to an external site (with a link back to HN), and then tweeted about it from an account claiming to be about the 'flu.
It doesn't really bother me; I'm just not sure what it is trying to achieve.
It's trying to get their twitter profile (which contains a link to their site) ranked by using links from HN posts which contains links to other sites even though the context of the links differ It would have been smarter to repost links and RSS feeds of medical blogs...
If you have not recovered in two years then there is something wrong. Even manual penalties should fall off around then. You may have to get a new domain name. Your content can be moved over to it.