Affiliate Programs

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A few days ago I followed a link from my dashboard over to David Airey’s blog. Seems David was slapped with a Google Rankings Penalty for practicing Black Hat Seo and having paid links to bad neighborhoods…who would have thought that David was a Black Hatter??!! It’s always the ones you least expect! :-(   Next thing you’ll know is that ezinearticles is only accepting kids books!

Seriously though, If you’ve read David’s blog then you know it was unintentional and that David is about the furthest thing away from being a Black Hatter as you can get.

However, this just goes to prove that anyone can get slapped by Google if you’re not cautious about the steps they implement on their website!

Running a contest and asking the participants to link back to you sounds innocently enough, but Google considers this a SEO Black Hat technique and will come after you for it.

In my opinion, Google really got serious about this technique when John Chow was using it to bomb Google with “make money online”. John Chow was slapped down then and has been since, for what Google calls Black Hat SEO techniques. Kinda sad isn’t it?

How To Reverse A Google Ranking Penalty

Luckily, David got some help from a few quality SEO experts and was able to reverse his Google penalty.  Not everyone is so lucky.

In a nutshell, here is what David did to reverse his Google Ranking Penalty.

1. He removed the bad links
2. He asked all the contestant participants to remove links to his site
3. He submitted a reinclusion request through Google Webmaster Tools
4. He went over to Matt Cutt’s blog and personally swore to the God of Google himself that he’d never ever, under no circumstances what-so-ever play around with Black Hat SEO techniques and asked for forgiveness (okay, I couldn’t resist that description :))

The God of Google smiled down upon David and forgave him and blessed his site once more with good SERP rankings! (okay, that’s the last one…I promise :))

Yeah, I imagine it’s funny now but I know when you go from a couple thousand hits a day to virtually none, it’s no laughing matter. I am happy David got his rankings back!

To read the details of how David got his Google Ranking Penalty Reversed, read his story. It should be a reminder how downhill things can go without you even realizing it…until it’s too late. David has many excellent links to SEO resources and other information on how to reverse a Google Rankings Penalty. Let’s hope you never need them!