Wednesday, June 20, 2007
We're back from SES Milan!...with a couple of clarifications.
Ciao everybody! We just got back from Italy—great weather there, I must say! We attended SES in Milan on the 29th and 30th of May. The conference was a great opportunity to talk to many of you. We really had a good time and want to thank all the people who stopped by to simply say "hi" or to talk to us in more detail about search engine strategies. This gave us a chance to talk to many participants and many of the big Italian actresses and actors in the SEO and web marketing worlds. We discussed recent developments in the Italian internet market, SEO strategies and evangelizing.
A number of you have raised interesting questions, and we'd like to go through two of these in more detail.
This is a situation a webmaster might find themself in: I optimized this site using some sneaky techniques that are not in accordance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. I got away with it for a while and it helped me to rank in second position for certain keywords. Then, suddenly, I got an email from Google saying my site has been banned from the index because of those techniques (in these emails there is always an example of one of the infractions found). I now have cleaned up the site and after some days the site was back in the index. Why on earth doesn't my site rank in the second position anymore, even though I've already paid for the sneaky techniques we used?
OK, before answering let me ask you a couple of questions:
- Didn't you optimize your site with those techniques in order to artificially boost the ranking?
- Didn't you think those techniques had worked out (in a short term perspective at least)?
So, if there