Keith Brown   Sep 04 2012   Flag

This gets points for the title, but props for actually having a worthwhile post to back it up.

Zachary Tong   Sep 04 2012   Flag

I enjoyed the honesty of the article...but it seems that Penguin did exactly what it was supposed to do in this case. It remove a spammy website that provided little value to users. Without actually knowing what the website is, here is what we know about it: -Exact-match, four-hyphen URL. Translation: "I want google to like this URL" -Default theme which is butt-ugly. Translation: "I don't care about users" -Heavily optimized link structure. Translation: "Google look at all my pages" -No variety in anchor text. Translation: "Seriously, Google, look how awesome this page is" -Templated content. Translation: "I don't actually have good or real content because I don't care about users" -Adsense site. Hard to say, but it sounds like all this site did was collect pageviews for Adsense. It's no wonder google slapped it down. The site clearly catered only to Google. I think the moral isn't "This is why Google delisted me", but rather "This is why you should have real content."

Nick LeRoy   Sep 04 2012   Flag

The default design was modified with a custom header and some other small changes to make it not look like the typical default design but I get your point. Agree with your assessment on the domain & link structure but disagree with the content element. While it was the issue in this instance the content itself is very valuable and researched. It just happened to be the same valuable content that answered the same question for each page. For example, how to do be a doctor in state X. Only very little info is unique to each state as the requirements are the same.

Tad Chef   Sep 05 2012   Flag

Rather how Google Penguin smacked you and how you slowly stood up after begging it to let you go.