Akismet ban lifted, kudos to their support!

Well, that was fast! I mean really fast. Just a few hours after I submitted my request, Alex from Akismet contacted me, and after several checks and emails back and forth by today's morning I am free! Feels really good, thank you Alex, and kudos to Akismet overall, it's nice to have business with you guys! :)

Does Akismet ban affect Google ranking?

LOL I was banned by akismet. Well, not me personally, but my brand new URL that I created for my main money making page just a couple of months ago and made a redirect - which several previous posts were about.

Funny how I figured this. I did not comment on blogs with this URL yet at all. Never till yesterday. And yesterday I went to investigate my main competitor links - which was prompted by my drop in SE results for my main keywords. Yes, I got a serious drop like a week and a half ago, two keywords went to the second page, and one dropped from 3rd place to 4th which accounted for a total 50% drop of traffic. And yes, my main competitor got ahead of me on all keywords. I am still investigating the reasons for this drop, hence an attempt to figure out what competitor is doing.

So, I went to Yahoo site explorer and took a look at his links. All the first page were blog comments on high PR posts, and I naturally went to comment on the same posts. Yet my comments did not go through! WTF I thought? So I went to one of my own blogs and commented there. Yep, it went directly to spam! OK, so I went to a handful on friends' blogs and commented there and had them rescue my comments from spam. Did not help. I could continue this route since I own quite a few blogs and my friends own even more together, But I just stopped and thought I would rather try Akismet support.

I don't remember making a single comment with this URL, let alone spamming blogs. Been there, done that, don't do this anymore for quite some time, so I am positive it was not my action that caused the ban. Then what? Likely it was my competitor. Dirty stuff, granted. Looks like he is not very picky in his methods. So my second thought was - heck, let me do the same to him! Then I sorta pondered about it and decided to play nice. Like I don't have a proof he did it, only suspicion. I will give him a benefit of the doubt, keeping this incident in mind however.

So I won't spam blog comments with his URL. And I won't try to get off Akismet blacklist with undercover activity - I will just submit a support request to them. I did not do anything wrong, why should I hide? Will see how it goes, and will try to keep you posted.

One more thought however - could it be that this Akismet ban affected my Google ranking? Searched the net, and found another blog post about Google downranking coinciding with Akismet blacklist. Something to ponder about...

Theoretically it should not happen, because this way BigG will promote dirty competition, which definitely will hit the relevance of their search results, yet practically there is no limit to stupidity, so you never know :)

Well, here is the letter I sent to Akismet support:

Hello,

Looks like one of my urls http://XXX.html is considered spam by Akismet. I am positive I did not spam comments. In fact this url is just about two months old, and I even can't remember ever placing a comment with it before yesterday, when I actually discovered it does not go through. I would greatly appreciate it if you can look into this for me.

Thanks and regards, Joshua

The results are here: http://adsense-diary.blogspot.com/2009/04/akismet-ban-lifted-kudos-to-their.html