If you read my post yesterday, you know that I’m pretty pissed about UpDowner backlinks to my website, which could be a reason that I’ve lost so much traffic coming from search. I posted the article on Google + today, and got a response from my friend David Frosdick:
“They have totally bashed one of my sites. I found this: http://www.updowner.com/faq#q7 I might try that…”
Knowing how smart David is, I knew that this could be a good tactic and I followed the link. Here’s what UpDowner says in answer to an FAQs question:”How can I block my site from showing on Updowner?
“You have few methods to block your site from Updowner listing:
- Register your site with us...”
- A robots.txt file..
“If you want to block Updownerbot from indexing your site type in your robots.txt:
User-agent: Updownerbot
Disallow: /
- Meta tags...
“To prevent all robots from indexing your site, place the following meta tag into the <head> section of your index page:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> (Ed. note: DO NOT do this, unless you want all of your pages left out of search. I’m only including this option to show you why you shouldn’t use it, unless your site is private.)“To prevent only Updownerbot from indexing:
<meta name=”Updownerbot” content=”noindex”>”
OK, all good suggestions, but if they have already crawled your site , I’m wondering if adding meta tags or blocking the site in robots.txt will make an impact on the UpDowner backlinks already in their system — as in, they already have them; they don’t need to crawl your site to get the links to your pages. I’m guessing it will be more efficient to sign up for the site. That way, when you tell them NOT to include your site, they have to honor your request and remove all of the links pointing back to you. (One can hope.)
To register, you have to add a meta tag to your index page or you can just upload a verification file, which is easiest. It’s just like verifying for Google Webmaster Tools. Download the 55 byte file and upload it to your site’s main directory. So, for me, it’s public_html/theseonewsblog. For you it may be www/yourdomain or public_html/yourdomain. (Some folks prefer to use the www directory. Makes no difference.)
Once you’ve done that, then plug in your domain at UpDowner and verify your account.
At the top of that page, there is a link that says, “Block Site,” and when you click it, UpDowner will not list your site. I’m hoping that means they’ll delete the links they’ve placed pointing to us, too, but well… time will tell.
If they have not, I plan to write to them and ask them to remove any UpDowner backlinks to this domain. We’ll see how that goes. As I mentioned yesterday, it’s kind of like jousting at windmills, but you gotta try. Once Google gives us a way to disavow backlinks, the better this will be for everyone. I mean, Google really hurt me and I can’t see how I deserved it. I’m guessing that there are lots of people wondering the same thing. David is case in point.
Now, on to Matters.com and figuring out how to fix those links. I really didn’t need this. Google, I’m really mad at you right now.
As if you care. 
It appears they have gone rogue and are redirecting links to known bad sites as of today. I hope Google is watching what this site is about.
Hi Susanne, That’s just great. Can you tell me where you got that information? I’ll write about that issue, for sure, but need to verify. Did you notice it in your Webmaster Tools account or did you find the information on another website? I’ll check this out. Thanks so much for the heads up.
Pat
Yes, I followed the links in the Webmaster Tools to see if they had removed my site like they said they did. They may have made the wrong people mad and are having their site hijacked or something. The links have worked on and off the past day. At times the links had changed from http://www.updowner.com to ww10.updowner.com and those were the ones that were redirecting to bad sites. Even tho my site seems to have been removed from updowner, my links from them in Webmaster Tools have gone up this past week. This is crazy.
Sure is. Mine seem to be coming down since I told them to block my site. But I have another, and I just noticed that it’s Mattters.com (3 t’s). I’m going to have to try robots for that because it’s just a big word cloud. I have like 5,600+ links from there. This whole thing is bogus. Google has no right to mess with sites which had nothing to do with gathering these links. I think they should step back and re-think this algo shift, but they won’t.
[...] Pat Marcello is pretty ticked off at Google right now. The Penguin gob smacked his site, cutting traffic in half. The sad part is, he has not participated in any black hat SEO. It looks like it may be links from one spammy/scammy sites that is the culprit and he’s doing everything possible to get those links un-indexed. You can read his two posts here and here. [...]
Thanks for the trackback, my friend. ‘Cept, I’m a girl.