That Danny!
Last week I got an insight into how Google penalties work if you use a URL too many times in a blog entry.
In my recent article, I covered how scammers target Sedo users.
The article was included in the Google index within the hour, as it usually is for my blog, and for the following three days I had 80-100 daily unique users reach it through Google.
Then on the fourth day – all traffic to the page from Google stopped. Nothing. Nada.
After a quick investigation, I found that that particular page was no longer included in the Google index. The rest of my site was unaffected.
I looked at it in more detail and theorised that because I quoted the correspondence with the scammer, which repeatedly included his email address (“murphy@eliteinvestment.net”), Google must have decided that this was a spam message and excluded it from its index – probably because Google ignored the “@” sign and treated the companyname.com part as a URL, thus viewing it as being repeated many times over. The other option is that it doesn’t like too many repeats of the same email address, although i like my first theory better.
I decided to test my theory, and reduced the total number of references to the company from a total of ten URLs/emails (eliteinvetment.net) to only three. I then updated my sitemap and pinged Google to re-crawl my site.
Sure enough, a week later my article has been re-indexed, and is hitting traffic again. An insight into the mind of the (fluffy) beast.
It also shows that my pages were first ingested and indexed, and only a few days later the penalty was applied.
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