Exactly one month ago my entry about Ubuntu Girl hit the Digg front page, so now is the high time to check out the rankings for “ubuntu girl” within 4 major search engines. Let’s start with listing four base facts at first:
- blog entry has received about 1,500 backlinks (according to Yahoo)
- sites that share link juice are geolocalized all over the world
- in most cases link values & anchor texts are different
Now you have got enough technical information, there are the reviews:
Bad news - it looks like Google’s algorithm has marked the growing link popularity of my entry as a “stinky thing“, so my post has been automatically penalized & removed from results for that search term (or position has been dramatically degraded, who cares). BTW I can see one other thing - two other pages from Florchakh Dot Com (post about Firefox Girl & tag for “Ubuntu“) are listed on the second page of results for the same goddamn search term…
This one doesn’t need any comments - my post is ranked as #2, Digg as #3, and this is completely okay in my humble opinion.
Live Search shows story from Digg as the first result, and my post is the second one. I think I don’t have any negative comments, too.
Recently when I was checking search results in Ask.com (around 2 weeks ago) their engine seemed to be not up-to-date, I didn’t even notice a story published on Digg. Today I’m #3 and Digg is #4. It’s enough to be satisfied for me (you see, I visit Ask.com once a blue moon…)
Conclusions:
Unfortunately, only Google does have a problem.
I think I’ve heard that Matt Cutts recommends viral marketing & social networking as the only two right-minded ways of promotion for webmasters. Sorry Matt, I am afraid I just cannot see it. My PERSONAL blog gets into Google Sandbox without a reason, while hundreds of spammers easily can get their sucky content indexed & hanging around all over the SERPS…
PS: This penalty affects only one post so I’m not boiled, in fact 
September 14th, 2007 #
Nice, I’ve yet to hit the Digg front-page, which I suppose is either a curse or a blessing.
September 15th, 2007 #
Does any other search engine other than Google matter? I’m still to find a person that I know who uses Yahoo or MSN search.
September 15th, 2007 #
Jeremy Steele: I didn’t any “external” SEO for my personal blog, guess this is the reason why my post was penalized. Sounds scary, but it seems that linkbait would be more natural to Google if I had gamed Google rankings & worked better link frequency on my own
Marc: http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/and-now-back-to-our-regularly-scheduled-searching34538.html
September 16th, 2007 #
Well, if someone is using Yahoo or MSN search, I probably don’t want them visiting my blog anyway.
I get a lot of hits from MSN image search for some weird reason. Stopped now.
September 16th, 2007 #
I don’t understand, Marc. As far as I remember people that use Yahoo or Live Search do click on ads more often than Google users. In short - you want them visiting, don’t you?
September 16th, 2007 #
Well, perhaps. However my traffic indicates negligible Yahoo and MSN users.
September 19th, 2007 #
Sorry to hear about your dropped rankings. At least your overall rankings haven’t dropped. Has your Google traffic increased overall?
September 19th, 2007 #
Page which is listed as first result drives people directly to my blog, so all in all I’m not a loser. Thanks for that question Dee, I haven’t paid attention - the answer is yes, overall traffic from Google was increased. Funny, doesn’t it?
September 24th, 2007 #
This is really interesting. I can’t believe Google would penalize the article. It should be pretty easy for Google to workout that Digg featured the article and then links were generated from there. Strange.
September 26th, 2007 #
I hope this doesn’t happen to me
September 27th, 2007 #
Surely, your blog does have good link frequency. There’s no need to be scared