After reading through the Widgetbait Gone Wild blog post and reading over 180 comments, I am taken aback that nobody suggested that JustSayHi stick to their gun and keep the website running. This is going to set a bad precedent for many other online businesses. 

Before you read this, I am neither an expert in online businesses nor in the SEO world. I am still struggling through the online landscape and I am not writing this to provide business advise to JustSayHi. I am writing this as I have issues on a personal level with closing a well to do business for the sake of Google, who doesn't give a damn about your business.

That being said, here are some reasons why JustSayHi should keep working on their site:

  1. 500,000 members = large audience with relatively strong brand.
  2. 475,000 pages on the internet linking to you = vote of confidence.
  3. 260,000 visitors/month (Quantcast) - I know it has dropped to 50% of what it was, but the site is still in the top 10,000 sites out of tens of millions of websites.
  4. JustSayHi is very creative, and their success is proof of that. 

JustSayHi should be working on diversifying the traffic sources and consider the following: 

  1. Should they buy other dating sites?
  2. Should they be partnering with sites where they get teen traffic and drive referral traffic to their site?
  3. How can they personalize the site and experience?
  4. They can use email as a marketing tool to drive another 10 million users. I am sure if you have 10 million users, most searchers will be on your site finding partners.
  5. Get on Oprah/TV shows and reach a larger audience.
  6. Do they have a product to sell? If so, they can build a large affiliate channel. Creating an ecosystem around the site will help make the business more stable and have a larger following.
  7. If they have revenue, spend on SEM - Google will definitely take their money then.
  8. Have banner ads on every other website - checkout Chevrolet ads,, or

They should keep going until they have > 10M users and are in top 100 websites. Then, file for re-consideration if they still need to file for one. If they have 100,000 spammy links compared to 10 million total backlinks, I don't think it will impact them. 

P.S: I am not supporting spam but I don't care about changing my business for sake of Google, either.