By Luke Bonanno
Update: August 7, 2011.
It was six months ago today that this site was hit with a severe Google penalty. We aren't the slightest bit wiser about it now than we were then, when weren't notified, but left to find out that we were being pushed down five or six pages in the search engine's results. The experience has produced a variety of emotions for me, among them soul-crushing depression and complete bewilderment. How does this happen without warning or explanation to something I've spent almost every day for the past 10½ years working hard on with the purest of intentions?! Now, with seemingly no end to this utter mystery in sight, the penalty itself is far less offensive than the arrogant and unaccountable way that Google has dealt it.
There are lessons to be learned from this. Any billion-dollar businesses out there? Listen up. If your company is founded on returning good search engine results and the creator of a site you ranked highly for ten years contacts you and brings to your attention an issue that is preventing that original, high-quality site from reaching but a fraction of the people it used to, why not take notice and fix it or say anything of use instead of responding to his reconsideration requests with the equivalent of a middle finger or two: a form letter stating "We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines." That's the type of thing you might send a life-long spammer or someone flagrantly dabbling in underhanded techniques to win traffic, not someone who stays up past sunrise to make sure a detailed DVD review is as timely as possible. Your company makes over $1 billion a month and you can't pay a human being to look at and respond to issues like this?
Are you a much smaller business, maybe one that publishes on the Internet? Know that this could happen to you, without warning, explanation, or resolution. Where others have a brain and a heart, Google has an algorithm and the belief that they're never wrong and never have to answer to any one. This sort of thing happens all the time, in amusing defiance to the company's unofficial "Don't be evil" mantra.
Those of you who aren't a big or small business, but have enjoyed reading this site recently or at any time over the past ten and a half years, the lesson for you is that Google does not care about you. You might have already suspected that, but it could not be more clearly revealed in this episode. Go ahead and open Google in a new window, then alt-tab back here. Do a search for "dvdizzy" or "dvdizzy.com" (with or without quotes, it doesn't matter). What do you find at the moment? A new appspot.com site that simply copies ours, with various elements broken. Hey, that is in complete violation of our front page copyright notice ("Contents of this website may not be copied in any form without permission."), in clear defiance of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (though Google denied a request for its removal), and certainly in stark opposition of Google's stated principles of rewarding original content. Because of that copy, you won't find the DVDizzy.com front page even on page 6, when our results finally turn up, because although though we somehow violate those quality guidelines, we don't violate them enough to disappear outright, only to be buried six pages in, where only the most persistent and picky searchers will venture.
Now, open up Bing and Yahoo! in additional windows. Search for DVDizzy or DVDizzy.com. Would you look at that? There is the real site right there with several pages nearby and that unauthorized proxy one nowhere to be found. Now search for disney dvd reviews. Priscilla Weems interview. Disney songs countdown. Disney villains countdown. Follow Me Boys DVD review. You might notice the results are similar, if not identical on Yahoo! and Bing; Bing powers Yahoo! these days. What you'll also notice is that their results are considerably better than what Google offers, namely in that they include at or near the top the very items you would be searching for with such phrases (at best, Google returns that site scraping our content). Yahoo! and Microsoft (Bing's owner) are both multi-billion dollar companies too and for all I know, they could possibly be just as evil as Google has been, penalizing sites robotically and remaining inaccessible. But I've yet to see it. What I have seen are my e-mails and the e-mails of readers upset by this fall on deaf ears at Google.
I've seen the Twitter account of Matt Cutts, the head of Google's "web spam" team. That is the division of Google that dispatches and supposedly removes penalties. Yes, the phrase "web spam" somehow now refers to my life's work; I guess I've been listing the wrong occupation on my 1040s these past years. Cutts blissfully ignores every message on this subject (and some others whose lives are overturned by his company) while shooting smilies at those who kiss up to him and posting videos and articles that promote his division's Kafkaesque management style. Say what you want about Twitter, but it allows a front-row seat to business failure that years ago would have remained behind closed doors.
What could Google even suspect/accuse us of doing that would make them bury us in the results for over six months without explanation? I've lost much sleep and at least $10,000 wondering that and have concluded that this is their loss and the loss of anyone who relies of them for their search needs (and that remains a majority of the Internet, though Bing is gladly gaining ground).
Now, how about this Sitepocalypse thing? Is that still happening? Probably, but no sooner than October. I believe in this site 100%. So, even as it's fallen from a sufficient full-time salary to the earnings of a high school student with a job, I've kept at it, not even slowing our content output to make sense of this madness. I hope you find our DVD and Blu-ray reviews are not only among the best you'll find (and I do mean "find") on the Internet, but they are the best they've ever been. If the passion, time, and knowledge poured into them does not come through, then, just like Google, we are failing everyone.
While obviously a labor of love right now, running this site is something I intended to do indefinitely. So too is eating and having a home in which to live. All of this is threatened by this senseless penalty. Short of fixing some broken links (to which I'll be devoting countless hours to in the coming weeks) and randomly deleting the majority of the site (which I don't intend to do), I've pretty much exhausted all my options of getting the penalty lifted. My expectation that Google will fix this situation is, like my view of the company these days, around zero. Beyond that, there is the hope that Bing and Yahoo! catch up to Google in the search engine market, a goal Microsoft is spending heavily to achieve and one which my few case studies clearly support.
What can you, the reader, do to help keep us online? Visiting the site daily would help. So too would liking us on Facebook, following us on Twitter, and subscribing to our free newsletter (send a blank e-mail to
UltimateDisney-subscribe@topica.com). On the top right side of our Facebook page, you can choose to "Invite Friends" to "like" us. Even if only two of your friends joined, we would triple our reach there.
Another big help would be to go through any one of our links when you buy anything from Amazon.com (we get a small percentage of the sale at no cost to you); use our schedule to place your fall preorders there. As you likely know, their selection and service is the best around.
Planning to join the
Disney Movie Club? Sign up through our linkand it's like making a $25 donation to us, plus you get a good deal on a bunch of Disney DVDs and Blu-rays and access to Club exclusives that even we haven't seen.
I also strongly encourage giving some thought to whether Google is a company you want to support. I've relied on them for a long time and had been satisfied, but this unconscionable saga makes it impossible to ever want anything to do with them again. We are slowly phasing out their AdSense program and are looking for a sufficient replacement for the site search feature we extensively rely on (which became subpar once Google stopped frequently updating our site's listings with crawl data; now articles don't show up until about a week after they're posted, if at all).
I'm completely aware that these rantings come across as bitter, depressing, pathetic, and downright loony. I don't blame those who stopped reading several paragraphs ago. Of course, this is more difficult to write than to read. But to not share these experiences does a disservice to all whose lives are similarly and inexplicably ruined by Google, who exerts power and then remains mum. A lack of candor may help to minimize manipulation and thwart genuine deception, but it also renders the company reckless, unaccountable, compassionless, and inhumane.
Once again, questions, comments, and condolences are welcome at tsdvd at yahoo.com. I interpret Google's unresponsiveness to mean they are embarrassed by this and wish it'd go away. Help make that not happen by liking, tweeting (throw in an @mattcutts for good measure!), and sharing now:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/UltimateD ... 0029370899
http://twitter.com/#!/ultimatedisney
