Hi,

I recently have found out that all the links from other web sites that would show when I searched for link:domain.com in google have been removed. Their used to be 14 now theres 0 :S

I can't think of anything I did wrong, all those links were from magazine articles and manufacturer directories and such. I do own WebPosition 4 Professional and have used it a few times but only in use with the Google API.

I was reading the Google help section awhile back and came across a statement that they do not recommend the use of WebPosition and so I emailed them asking them about this.

Think it was shortly after that that all the backlinks to my site were removed, think the only thing I did was bring attention to my site by asking Google about WebPosition 4.

Here's the email if any of you are interested:

Me:
---------------
Hi,

I read in Google's Help section that you do not recommend using program's
like WebPosition. It was my understanding that it was considered OK to use
it as long as your automatied rank checking was using the Google API.

Nick

True or False?
---------------
Them:

Hi Nick,

Thank you for your note. We don't recommend using the product mentioned
under any circumstances.

Regards,
The Google Team
----------------
Me:

Thanks for the response. Basically what I'm trying to do is make sense of
Google's results when certain keywords are typed in that have a strong
correlation to the industry I'm working in. I'm the computer guy at a
small
material handling manufacturing company and our main product line is lift
tables, when I type in "lift tables" into Google, all of our competitors
rank very high (even the small ones), but our website doesn't (page 4) and
so that got me thinking that our competitors must be doing something we
aren't as our site is just as relevant as theirs are.

Thus I thought a software program like WebPosition would be able to help
determine what I'm doing wrong but you don't recommend any such software.
So
I don't know if I'm going out on a limb here but what do you recommend?
I've
looked over Google's suggestions posted in regards to creating a Google
friendly web-site and have tried to modify our website to fit those
recommendations as much as possible but nothing seems to help.

Nick
---------------------
Them:

Hi Nick,

Thank you for your reply. If you'd like to write your own program using
the Google Web APIs to check your site's effectiveness, please feel free
to do so. You may find useful information in Google Groups at
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/google.public.web-apis

Regards,
The Google Team
---------------------
Me:

Hmmm...to be completely honest I'm a bit confused. Modern society would fall apart, ie not able to handle the current population, without specialization. Why would I spend countless hours attempting to develop an application to perform the types of queries that would be useful to me when there's a company who already has a product that does such? I think my time would be better spent actually doing my job, or I suppose we could all grow and harvest all our own food and sew our own clothing...but I'd rather not. ;)

So then I gather that Google is not adverse to types of applications like WebPosition but only with the commercialization of those products? Would an open source type of program like WebPosition then be perferable? Does one exist?

Oh and also, I've recently (today) noticed that when I do a search for "link:mydomain.com" theres no results although there used to be (a week ago or so) around 14 results. Then say I do a search for one of our competitors "link:theirdomain.com" and they come up with 17 results, some of which are links to tables of vendors that contain a link to our site as well. So Google has craweled that page obviously, but it only registers some of the links found? The page I'm using as an example is: http://www.indoff.com/mhvendors.htm.

I have been trying to create good links to our site, but now they have all seem to have gone 'poof' :(

And Google has maxed out my credit card in my AdWords campaign! lol

You're a harsh Mistress, Google :p

Nick
--------------------------

To which they failed to respond...so looks like I kinda stepped on my own toes, any recommendations about how I can go about making good links to our site from this point or am I blacklisted or something?

-Nick