I think your case is the perfect example of collateral damage Google can cause. Sorry to hear how it went.

Pekka

I used to do a weekly hip hop albums report that, I think, got designated as duplicate content and that’s why it disappeared from Google’s index.

But I’m not sure cause they won’t tell me.

I did each report with a bunch of album covers plus a list of everything I could find of note coming out in the following week. Nobody else was doing this and everything related was of much lower quality.

I did however, post the list of titles on another blog which had a higher Google PR and had been online longer. Even though I linked back to the report site, that’s what I think led to it being marked duplicate content, if it was, even though I didn’t run the pics on the other site.

After disappearing from Google, the site gradually lost traffic and soon the time I put in was not worth the effort in financial return. Not that I needed a lot but I did need something near minimum wage for my efforts. Or even $5 an hour, a low fee for the best in the business.

Once I closed down the site, a lot of people started complaining and encouraging me to keep it going but goodwill is not enough in the middle of a recession.

So Google, for whatever reason, killed the best hip hop album report in the game and I can’t do anything about it.

I’m not the first and I sure won’t be the last but it really hurt to kill that project.

My name’s Clyde but OJR knows me as 98.94.173.168 cause homie don’t play these silly registration games.

I know good SEO consultants and done it myself. But there’s a lot of bad SEO advice as well.

Dear David Brazeal,

What I’m trying to say that there is a computer algorithm at Google that decides, independently from us mortals, what is good and bad content. It is built against sites that try to create long tail content, hyperlocal niche being a perfect example. Patch.com does exactly this. What stops the algorithm from deciding that Patch.com is trying to game Google and should be thus banned.

I know it’s a long shot, but future is made of weird stuff that we couldn’t expect to happen.

IMO it does if it gives the user a good experience, but I wonder if G feel the same way.

I’m a SEO consultant myself, I never use this kind of short term practices, no proper / ethical SEO consultant will ever do that.
Not all SEO consultants are just money angry chaps, some do love their job and do it properly.