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This web site has been sent to Hell by Google last August 11. Not really the actual “Hell” but to Google’s supplemental index. In other words, this site was penalized by Google. Because of the penalty, the posts where I used to rank high are not appearing anymore in the Google SERPs (search-engine results page).

Of this site’s visitors, 67% are coming from the search engines. From the search engines, 86.5% are Google users with Yahoo! users coming at a far second with 8%. It’s no wonder then that traffic to this site is adversely affected. From a record-high of 43,026 visitors in one day last August 9, I only got 345 visitors yesterday. Traffic from Yahoo!, Google Image and Bing as well as from social bookmarking sites and networks is the one keeping this site alive.

Why was I penalized?

One of Google’s guidelines specifically says,

What is a bad neighborhood?

A scraper site (those with copied content), a link farm, a site with large amounts of spam or malware and a site with illegal material is considered as a bad neighborhood. Sometimes, a legitimate site who has many links to bad neighborhoods can be considered as one as well.

How to know if your site is linking to a bad neighborhood?

Here’s a tool to check your links: Bad Neighborhood Detector.

However, use this only as a guide to locate potential problems. It is not intended to dictate who you do or do not link out to. Please read more at their post here.

Unfortunately for me, I have only known this tool after I was already penalized because I linked to bad neighborhoods albeit inadvertently.

Now that I have already removed my links to them, I’m waiting for Google to reevaluate me and lift the penalty.

Maybe it’s also time for you to check who you linked to. Don’t wait for the Big G to incur its wrath to your site.