Man... Don't piss google off.

Alright I admit it. There is no order to this blog. I just write whenever something pops in my head. Anyway I tend to read a lot of INC magazines mostly because I have a year's subscription of their stuff.
I came across an article that scared the crap out of me. It read "How Google Cost Me $4 million Dollars". Is about a guy who hired some over zealous SEO guys who broke the google laws when it came to SEO optimizations. Needless to say his site was blacklisted from google.
When your site is blacklisted from google , you are pretty much screwed. Especially if you run an established e-commerce site. Your sales drop significantly cause your traffic drops significantly. To make matters worse , if you are blacklisted on google, chances are you will be blacklisted on Bing, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves. It is a nasty situation. As I read this article , I cringed at the thought of this happening to me.

Well what do ya know... It did happen to our site. Fortunately I caught this on time. You see about 4 years ago , I was a lot more naive than I am now. My brother and I figured we should start a site where we sell flash powered desktop wallpapers. (Yeah... I know right? What the heck kind of idea is that?) . I tried to get the word out by spamming every single forum I could get my hands on. I am not entirely sure to what extent my spamming was responsible for the blacklisting, but I know it played a role in it.

For 2 days I searched google for the our domain and only to come up with our blog or mention of the domain in some whois site. I was pretty scared. So I decided to rectify the issue. Read up on google's SEO guidelines and how to request that your site be reconsidered. I sent them an email literally begging for forgiveness and sent them links of forums I spammed as a sign of good faith. I had a good feeling it was going to work, but I wasn't sure when exactly it was going to work. Everyday since I sent that email , I would query for our domain on google. A couple of weeks after, it was back on the google list :-).

But now that I think about it , I wouldn't have any problems waiting a couple of months to get the site on the google list. When you consider that our site is still in its infant stage and we don't have enough resources to service a larger stream of customers, it wouldn't have mattered if the only people who came to the site were people who visited the site directly or were refereed to it from our Facebook page or our Flickr account.