the richest man in atherstone

Hey guys,

One of my websites got penalised by Google!

The website is http://www.howtogetridofshinsplints.org and it crashed overnight from the Number 10 spot to the 650 spot for the keyword 'how to get rid of shin splints' lol

But I can't complain - it was my own fault for using shady backlink-building techniques.

Unfortunately, although I can name and shame myself, I can't name and shame the online utility I used because I can't remember what it is.

All I remember is that the software offered to create backlinks for me. I logged on to their webpage, filled in a form with my website name, email, url and a generic blog comment, I think and it did the rest (by 'the rest', i mean it completely screwed up my rankings lol). After 5 mins of form filling, I forget about it...

Although I noticed that I seemed to be getting quite a few auto-response emails as well, so the utility wasn't just filling in blog comment forms but any form it could find, including contact forms.

To be honest, I'm not sure what possessed me to try out something that definitely looked a bit dodgy - and I hate spam myself but this system was obviously a spam engine.

I guess I wanted to experiment a little with new techniques and measure how useful they were. As you can guess, this is not a method I will be trying again.

Saying that, however, it's a little worrying that a website can be penalized so easily. What if I were to fill in my competitors web details on this online utility...

UPDATE 14/06/2011
As if by magic, the shin splints website is now back in the top 10!

I've experienced the Google Shuffle before as rankings bounce up and down for a period of time, whilst Google works out which websites are most relevant but I've never experienced a bounce from the top 10 to 650th for three days then back into the top 10 - I still think it was penalised temporarily.

So what did I do? Well, it's more than likely anything I did had absolutely no effect on my rank, however for the sake of full disclosure I:

• Provided a YAHOO! Answer that linked to my website
• Wrote a new blog post on the website
• Removed links to it from my other websites (actually replaced them with a link to another page I own about shin splints
• Wrote this blog post

It's actually come back into the Google SERPS slightly higher than before (in 9th position), so i'm rather happy - especially considering a few days ago I thought the domain was doomed!

UPDATE 17/06/2011
It's out of the top 100 again lol

Hey guys,

Just wanted to let you know about the great time I had testing out kids 2 seater 12v electric cars the other day

(Click the link to take a look at some of the cooler models we looked at.)

My favourites were a yellow Lambourghini and a red Ferrari but there's some pics of some other cool models there too (including a farmer's truck that my 'farmer friend' thought was awesome.

Perhaps the most interesting I learned was that the big car manufacturers sell name and image rights to the toy car makers. It got me thinking about image rights in other areas, too, such as the vast millions David Beckham earns by simply putting his name on products.

I've never used this type of intellectual property in business before and was trying to think of ways I could integrate it somehow into into one of my existing businesses (it seems like an easy buck lol). Unfortunately, I don't know anyone that is famous enough (and I have no particular desire to try and become famous) but perhaps it could be done on a more local level using someone that is well known about town.

Anyhow, I've not really thought this through and have done nowhere near enough research into it but thought I'd jot it down here as a reminder to myself

Hey guys,

Just wanted to write a quick post to tell you about a new website I recently put about how to get rid of chest acne.

Although it's entitled 'how to get rid of chest acne' most of the tips and tricks on there also relate to other forms of bodily acne (acne on the shoulders, back, legs etc.).

It's still very much in the early stages and with so many acne products out there on the market, I decided to monetize it with google adsense in the first instance whilst I work on getting it ranked high in the search engines.

If it gets a decent amount of traffic, I'll probably switch to a commission-based affiliate scheme such as Clickbank or Commission Junction but in the meantime the Adsense will suffice until I know how many potential customers are in this niche.

Arkad