Minus 300 Penalty?

If you do a Google search for "Travel Blog" right now, you'll find Blogabond sitting at result number 361. That's not very good, especially since we're at #3 on Yahoo! and in the top 10 on most other search engines. What's the story?

I banged my head against the wall for months trying to figure out what the deal was here. We had climbed up to #60 for a while, but then got bumped down 300 points in a day. It looked to be a penalty of some sort that Google has been known to hand out for naughty web sites. But what was Blogabond doing that could be considered shady SEO?

For the longest time, the only thing I could come up with was that it didn't like our "Find Places" section that has links to every city in the world. So if your company was planning to send you to Mbayabougou, Mali, you could at least find it on the map. I figured that this page belonged in Google's index, but maybe they didn't really want it. Maybe they were actually penalizing me for putting a link to this page. Could be, since the crawler wouldn't see the Google Map up top. It would only see a blank page with the same words from the URL.

Anyway, today I made the painful decision to put rel="nofollow" links to all of these pages. I figure I'll wait for Blogabond users to put real content into these places before I expose them to the Spiders. Fair enough.

But then I came across this post on the Usenet. This guy is complaining about a minus-30 penalty for his site that has a bunch of Hotel Affiliate links on it. Hmm. I've read elsewhere that Google HATES hotel affiliate links. Wait a minute... I still have those crappy HostelBooker links all over the place in the Map pages. I guess they could be considered Hotel Affiliates. And hey, I bet those links are showing up on pages without any real content at all! Aha! I think I've finally found it!

Ok, change of plan. Hostelbookers, you're getting the boot. I never got any bookings from you anyway and now it looks like you're dragging down my Google rankings. While I'm at it, Amazon, you're gone too. You guys never made any money either and you take up a lot of space. We're back to a slim, nearly ad-free Blogabond. Cool.

I think I'll still leave the rel="nofollow"'s on those small town links for the time being. Give the spiders a chance to crawl all the location pages again and see that the affiliate links are gone. I'll follow this up in a month to see whether it worked.

Testing out the Blog Map

Just added the ability to stick your blog map wherever you'd like