A little while ago I shared with you my experience of buying some paid reviews for a website of mine.

Everything was going quite nicely until a few weeks ago I googled the website name and the homepage was no longer showing in the Google index. Sub pages from the site were showing up, but the homepage seemed to have disappeared on any keyword search which would previously have brought it up. It hadn't just lost its position, it had seemingly disappeared from the index on those search terms.

Now, I have quite a few websites and I've never ever had that happen before. The only thing about this site which was different was that I had used paid reviews, so it seemed likely to me that the site had suffered some kind of penalty. I did a bit of reading up on this kind of thing, and got some good advice from Richard at Quality Nonsense, and realised I had to get rid of those paid reviews.

Easier said than done. I didn't have any direct contact details for the bloggers, so started posting comments on their blogs which seemed to go ignored. I used their Contact forms and still couldn't get any joy. Eventually, one of them replied. She wasn't at all suprised at my predicament as she told me she thought she had just been penalised herself, with her Google PageRank being wiped out. She agreed to take the link to my relief. That was one down, one to go but this second blogger was proving to even more elusive. My comments on his blog were still not making it onto the site or getting a response to him. I got his details from the whois records of the domain and sent emails and still I heard nothing.

At this point I was getting irritated and started googling the guy's name. I felt I was getting closer to my target when I got a new email address. I was feeling pretty surly at this point and my email was terse and my feelings quite clear. Only problem was, it wasn't the same person - just another blogger with the same name - and this child (yes, I was reduced to sending shitty emails to a child!) kindly replied to tell me he had never sold links in his life and didn't know what I was talking about.

When I saw new posts on the guys blog, I knew he hadn't been run over by a bus so I decided to step things up a gear. In a pincer movement, I tried to add him to my MSN, I generated "forgotten password" messages for the admin account on his blog, and sent him one more email reminding him I hadn't actually left feedback *yet* on the paid link service I used. I wanted him to feel some heat. Within an hour, he emailed me back to apologise for the delay and the link was removed. Phew!

With the links gone, I went to the "reconsideration request" form at Webmaster Central and wrote offered a full mea culpa to Google. I explained I now realised the error of my ways and would never be so foolish again.

A week or so later, my site's homepage was back in the index for all the search terms I expected to bring it up. I don't know if it just automatically picked up on the fact the links were gone, or if my email was effective, or if both played a part. But the cloud had been lifted and I was happy.

The irony of all this is that I have my fair share of sites which are not much cop, but this particular site was a real pain staking labour of love with all orginal content which I gathered and created. I was just so keen to expedite its growth, I chose the wrong path. So if you're thinking of buying links to your sites from any paid link or review services, bear this cautionary tale in mind...

By the way....

Is anyone watching Damages on BBC One on Monday nights? It really is the best thing on the TV at the moment!

Labels: paid links