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Did WidgetBucks Just Get Yanked From The SERPS?
SEO News Source: http://www.volodymyrzablotskyy.com
Story Found By: AndyBeard 1679 Days ago
Category: SEO
Vlad spotted that Widgetbucks no longer ranks for their own name and speculates this might be because of the hidden links I spotted that you can’t remove.
 Comments10 Comments  

Comments

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from Halfdeck 1679 Days ago #
Votes: 1

Haven’t really looked closely, but that to me looks like a bad website set up that lead to the home page being dropped.If the home page isn’t in the index, it can’t rank for squat, now can it? :)JC, directories etc failed to rank for their domain name but in those cases, I believe their home pages were still indexed.

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from AndyBeard 1679 Days ago #
Votes: 1

They were previously in top spot.Based on some of the crap that is ranking then the clean link from Techcrunch should have been enough for them to rank regardless, even if the page was blocked with robots.txt and meta tags.http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/02/a-widget-that-actually-makes-money/I haven’t looked at the code in depth either but they are ranking on Yahoo, and on MSN an affiliate link is ranking that seems to be based around links from Jaiku

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from Halfdeck 1679 Days ago #
Votes: 1

"they are ranking on Yahoo, and on MSN"Yeah, but Yahoo and MSN’s bots don’t necessarily behave the way Googleblot does."They were previously in top spot."And now they’re nowhere because their home page isn’t in the index. Remember DMOZ with its missing home page? I also had a client that had the same problem. Sure, it could be penalized, but the chances of that is small. And even if its penalized due to hidden links, what does that prove? .. that Google is Evil?

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from VladTheAffiliate 1678 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Actually if you search site:widgetbucks.com you will see that are few pages in index, however all of those are in flash- which is kind of strange, would not they want to rank?

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from AndyBeard 1678 Days ago #
Votes: 1

They have some funny redirects going on which Googlebot doesn’t seem to handle well http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers/ 1. Requesting: http://widgetbucks.com GET / HTTP/1.1 Connection: Keep-Alive Keep-Alive: 300 Accept:*/* Host: widgetbucks.com Accept-Language: en-us Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Server Response: 301 Moved Permanently Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Location: http://www.widgetbucks.com/ Content-Length: 0 Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:27:04 GMT Connection: close Redirecting to http://www.widgetbucks.com/ ... 2. Requesting: http://www.widgetbucks.com/ GET / HTTP/1.1 Connection: Keep-Alive Keep-Alive: 300 Accept:*/* Host: www.widgetbucks.com Accept-Language: en-us Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Server Response: 301 Moved Permanently Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=033B52976279F2BE4EF1A47A3296042D; Path=/ Location: http://www.mpire.com/widgetBucks/home.page Content-Length: 0 Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:27:04 GMT Connection: close Redirecting to http://www.mpire.com/widgetBucks/home.page ... 3. Requesting: http://www.mpire.com/widgetBucks/home.page GET /widgetBucks/home.page HTTP/1.1 Connection: Keep-Alive Keep-Alive: 300 Accept:*/* Host: www.mpire.com Accept-Language: en-us Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Server Response: 301 Moved Permanently Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Location: http://www.widgetbucks.com/home.page Content-Length: 0 Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:27:04 GMT Connection: close Redirecting to http://www.widgetbucks.com/home.page ... 4. Requesting: http://www.widgetbucks.com/home.page GET /home.page HTTP/1.1 Connection: Keep-Alive Keep-Alive: 300 Accept:*/* Host: www.widgetbucks.com Accept-Language: en-us Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Server Response: 301 Moved Permanently Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Location: http://www.mpire.com/widgetBucks/home.page Content-Length: 0 Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:27:05 GMT Connection: close Redirecting to http://www.mpire.com/widgetBucks/home.page ... 5. Requesting: http://www.mpire.com/widgetBucks/home.page GET /widgetBucks/home.page HTTP/1.1 Connection: Keep-Alive Keep-Alive: 300 Accept:*/* Host: www.mpire.com Accept-Language: en-us Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Server Response: 301 Moved Permanently Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Location: http://www.widgetbucks.com/home.page Content-Length: 0 Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:27:05 GMT Connection: close Redirecting to http://www.widgetbucks.com/home.page ... 6. Requesting: http://www.widgetbucks.com/home.page GET /home.page HTTP/1.1 Connection: Keep-Alive Keep-Alive: 300 Accept:*/* Host: www.widgetbucks.com Accept-Language: en-us Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Server Response: 301 Moved Permanently Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Location: http://www.mpire.com/widgetBucks/home.page Content-Length: 0 Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:27:05 GMT Connection: close Redirecting to http://www.mpire.com/widgetBucks/home.page ... 7. Requesting: http://www.mpire.com/widgetBucks/home.page GET /widgetBucks/home.page HTTP/1.1 Connection: Keep-Alive Keep-Alive: 300 Accept:*/* Host: www.mpire.com Accept-Language: en-us Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Server Response: 301 Moved Permanently Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Location: http://www.widgetbucks.com/home.page Content-Length: 0 Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:27:05 GMT Connection: close Redirecting to http://www.widgetbucks.com/home.page ... 8. Requesting: http://www.widgetbucks.com/home.page GET /home.page HTTP/1.1 Connection: Keep-Alive Keep-Alive: 300 Accept:*/* Host: www.widgetbucks.com Accept-Language: en-us Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Server Response: 301 Moved Permanently Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Location: http://www.mpire.com/widgetBucks/home.page Content-Length: 0 Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:27:05 GMT Connection: close Redirecting to http://www.mpire.com/widgetBucks/home.page ... 9. Requesting: http://www.mpire.com/widgetBucks/home.page GET /widgetBucks/home.page HTTP/1.1 Connection: Keep-Alive Keep-Alive: 300 Accept:*/* Host: www.mpire.com Accept-Language: en-us Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Server Response: 301 Moved Permanently Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Location: http://www.widgetbucks.com/home.page Content-Length: 0 Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:27:05 GMT Connection: close Redirecting to http://www.widgetbucks.com/home.page ... 10. Requesting: http://www.widgetbucks.com/home.page GET /home.page HTTP/1.1 Connection: Keep-Alive Keep-Alive: 300 Accept:*/* Host: www.widgetbucks.com Accept-Language: en-us Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Server Response: 301 Moved Permanently Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Location: http://www.mpire.com/widgetBucks/home.page Content-Length: 0 Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:27:05 GMT Connection: close Redirecting to http://www.mpire.com/widgetBucks/home.page ... 11. Requesting: http://www.mpire.com/widgetBucks/home.page GET /widgetBucks/home.page HTTP/1.1 Connection: Keep-Alive Keep-Alive: 300 Accept:*/* Host: www.mpire.com Accept-Language: en-us Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Server Response: 301 Moved Permanently Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Location: http://www.widgetbucks.com/home.page Content-Length: 0 Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:27:05 GMT Connection: close Redirecting to http://www.widgetbucks.com/home.page ...

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from VladTheAffiliate 1678 Days ago #
Votes: 0

So I guess I was wrong taking a guess that Google may have penalized them.... Oh well that is not the first time I have made a fool of myslef.I was surprised nevertheless to see that they did not rank for their own name.

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from AndyBeard 1678 Days ago #
Votes: 1

Nothing certain about it VladI am not as technical about these things as people like Halfdeck, so I couldn’t say whether the emulation of how the redirects work for Google compared to Yahoo or MSN is accurate.I just know that when I set my user agent in Firefox as Googlebot it chokes, and with Yahoo and MSN it doesn’t.

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from VladTheAffiliate 1678 Days ago #
Votes: 0

The good thing about it if they follow the links they will get some good free consulting! lolBoth Yahoo and MSN have them in their index.Anyway, I had the banner only on one of my sites but I have removed it. Should have taken you initial review more seriousely though...

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from jonathan 1677 Days ago #
Votes: 1

I never even signed up for an account with them, just looks like another waste of time.less competition for the other good PPC biz’s out there now :)

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from Gamermk 1677 Days ago #
Votes: 1

This definitely looks like a very similar problem to what happened to DMOZ’s homepage.

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