Its a long tail question with 54,600,000 results in Google, but nobody really seems to have a concrete answer.  I’ve seen some things in my time that I would consider a penality, and I’ve seen some things that are just plain weird.  One of those is Kiwi Collection.  Three of my good SEO friends are working at this website, and they all have been cursed with a seemingly insolvable dilemma:  the homepage refuses to rank.  They have tried many different tests, experiments, pleading to the gods, but still no dice.  What is even more bizarre is that (until recently) their site was ranked as a PR6!  They get front page results for highly competitive keywords like “best luxury hotels”, but their homepage www.kiwicollection.com can’t even be found in the supplimental index.

I took a look at the site a few months back and learned they were inadvertantly hiding text and links due to some technical issues (CSS & Javascript.. go figure).  It was through that investigation that I learned that Google can indeed read onpage CSS, but not linked stylesheets.  So, rule of thumb #1:  Don’t use inline CSS… ever.  Not even as a joke, or a dare.

So, they got the site cleaned up, no hidden text/links and it validates perfectly, but still no love from Google.  They tried another test by putting the same code on an additional page (www.kiwicollection.com/best-hotels.php) and it ranks like gangbusters.  Clearly, they have a poisoned URL, but it is only that URL, and not the site.  I’ve seen page level penalties where a single page will get kicked out of the index, but a perfectly clean page that’s a PR6?  Very odd.

Just recently, their homepage dropped to a PR0.  I suspect that may be due to them adding the link canonical tag pointing that page to /best-hotels.php, and that the PR is being transferred.

It should be interesting to see how it transpires…

Apparently, if you get too many links from legitimate sources too quickly, Google gets scared? I recently asked some of my SEO friends for some links to my SEO resume. I was sitting roughly around #17 for the term, and wanted to push it to the first page… but unfortunately, I’m now down to the low 70s. The only change I had made was to get some legit links from friends. I paid them nothing, because I’m cheap. Still, I’m not really complaining, or spamming the Google webmaster forums whining about what happened to my ranks. Just wanted to express something I had suspected all along. Google can’t really decipher paid links from legitimate links, but instead probably base their algorithms on frequency. I probably just spooked the index, and expect that it’ll sort itself out eventually…

Ironic though, what with Google appologising for Google Japan’s recent controversy of purchasing paid posts. Seems like even Google has been tempted by the dark side… I intend to purchase a black hat and a 20-sided die for Matt Cutts…

Any of you SEO fanatics out there with a Google PR Toolbar on your browser may have noticed that this crazy SEO blog with 1 inbound link, a URL I bought a month ago, and a shelf life of 3 or so months is now a PR2…

Bwaaahahaha!

Just like the sandbox myth, it appears that Google’s illustrious page rank is about as accurate and useful for index ranks as stuffing 14,000 keywords into your meta tags… which is none what-so-ever…

Bwaaahaha!

This might be less funny if this site got any traffic, but the one hit I got from Hoboken doesn’t count as traffic in my books.

Bwaaaaahahaha!

Goodtimes.

Virgil has lead me out of the terraces…