Blacklisted by Google, local photographer learns a lesson

Google, which handles two-thirds of all Internet searches, is a make-or-break gatekeeper for many small businesses.

Just ask Guillermo Gomez. He once prided himself on being able to Google “St. Louis wedding photographers” and see his Ladue-based business, St. Louis Color, among the top three results.

Beginning in mid-September, though, the firm didn’t show up at all. Gomez discovered the problem Oct. 1, when he noticed that his website’s search-engine traffic had fallen by half.

He tried various search terms, including the company name. St. Louis Color was invisible.

Then the terrible truth dawned on Gomez: He had been blacklisted.

After a little research, including conversations with a search-engine optimization consultant, Gomez found the problem. He had created multiple versions of his home page to showcase various wedding slideshows. To Google’s Web-crawling program, called Googlebot, the duplicate pages looked like cheating.

It was an innocent mistake, says Gomez, who manages his own website. But he suffered the same fate as retail giant J.C. Penney, which got penalized in 2011 for using bogus links to improve its ranking on searches such as “dresses” and “area rugs.”

“My knowledge of Web design, and my desire to make my page unique, got me in trouble,” Gomez confesses. “I have never done anything to intentionally defraud Google.”

He has some gripes about Google — “nobody understands the algorithms” that rank searches, he says — but Gomez knew the giant company wasn’t going to bend. He needed to take responsibility for the problem.

He spent many hours rebuilding the website, killing the duplicate pages and eliminating other no-nos.

For example, invisible text — words and phrases that could be read by search engines but not by humans — used to improve a site’s ranking but now is frowned upon. Google is constantly trying to improve the search experience for consumers, and it scrambles to stay a step ahead of so-called “black hat” businesses that want to game the system.

Aaron Stevens, director of search and analytics at local marketing firm Moosylvania, says blacklisting cases like Gomez’s are rare. “In the few cases that I have seen,” he told me, “it was because people had little knowledge of what they were doing and they were willing to do anything that they think might help them.”

Google, Stevens added, is being “totally fair” and not trying to crush small businesses. “They do have a ton of power, but they make money by having and providing the most convenient and most relevant search results,” he said.

Gomez, for his part, is glad that his brush with invisibility didn’t occur during peak wedding-booking season, which runs from Thanksgiving to Valentine’s Day. His site’s traffic is starting to bounce back. Google still doesn’t show him on the first page of “St. Louis wedding photographers,” but putting the word “best” in front of those words will turn up a link to St. Louis Color as the No. 3 result.

Gomez now checks Google’s site analytics almost daily, in hopes that he’ll eventually be back to his former prominence.

“I have to start over, and I know it takes weeks,” he said.

He wants to tell his story, he says, as a cautionary tale for other business owners who might take their search engine ranking for granted.

The lesson: Don’t anger the gatekeeper.