I know “many” of you have contacted us asking what’s happening with Duvv, and when will it be ready. The title of this post explains almost everything.
We invited a few people to join Duvv, plus opened registration for a while and a number of people took the opportunity and jumped on board however soon after Duvv all but vanished from Google. Hence the development work came to a halt, with all the unique tools and functionality we were about to roll out left idle at 90% complete.
As you can see by this graph, things “started” to improve on the 18th of April and it looked like our worries were over. We began to make preparations to roll out the new blog designs, social networking, social media integrations and user tools when things returned to their “penalty state” on early the 24th.
I’m sure you can all understand, it simply would not be fair to have users sign-up when Google is intent on penalizing your blog before you even make it.
Why was Duvv.com penalized?
Good question, we mentioned back in February users attempting to exploit the site after we opened registration for a day by performing redirects on their blogs. We also started some test blogs, and for this we used blog names such as mortgages.duvv.com for a few reasons. For testing to simulate real users blogs, and for this instead of writing pages of blog posts we used “duplicate articles” namely PLR we had the rights to publish. I’m sure you’ll agree us writing code is more a priority than writing dozens of unique blog posts to simulate a bunch of real blogs.
Also these popular commercial subdomains would most likely be snapped up by spammers. We registered a handful first with a view to giving them away as prizes as the site gained in popularity.
We were unaware this “duplicate content” could kill a whole domains ranking in Google, likewise with the redirects but it has. Even unique pages on the Duvv domain don’t rank well anymore, so the whole domain has been shot down by Google.
Where to next?
We have decided to put an end to the whole Duvv project, it’s unfortunate that after investing $xx,xxx in a start-up that it won’t be launched however users will not be interested in a service that doesn’t rank well in a search engine like Google.com
The site never got past looking like a regular “Wordpress MU” and it’s a shame nobody will get to see the end result we were going to roll out.. But the service would of left Wordpress.com admiring what we done with the platform, especially with the Twitter, Facebook, MySpace API’s and integration that went far beyond simple widgets or feeds.
After speaking with other start-ups, partners and friends it’s surprising the general vibe regarding Google is “They can’t be trusted” and we agree. A month ago we started another project, and will be using a lot of the custom Duvv code base. However this time all the good stuff will be behind paid and registration walls and it won’t rely on Google, but rather Social Media so the people can vote and decide if what we do is worthy or not instead of an algorithm that operates largely on guesswork.
I really hope Google’s days are numbered, it’s time for the people to decide what’s valuable.
If you are going to invest in any business online, you need to ask yourself “How much does this rely on Google?” and if the answers more than a little.. Then modify that business model until the answers “Not at all”.
Take care everyone.
Duvv.com