Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Google Update Not Up To Date Yet

Even after this latest update from Google, there are lots of webmasters and website owners who are left in the blackhole of banned domains although they have legitimate sites, while Google still has a crapload of splogs and autogenerated sites (SE spam) in their index. Many of them never noticed anything until one day traffic just stopped coming in. Imagine one day seeing your traffic go from 3000 visitors a day to a trickle of 40 or so... hmmm... It's easy to panic. But often times a site is not banned, it's just dropped a few pages back in the serps. Which is natural given the nature of search engine algorithms. Things just change all the time.

Things to do:
- check your listing in Google with the site command [site:yourdomain.com]
- type yourdomain.com in Google to see if it's even listed in their index

- Check for content thieves who may have swiped your content illegally:
-- do searches for a phrase that's unique to your site, something you wrote and check it in Google with quotes

This last one is something you can actually do something about by submitting a DMCA violation complaint to Google: http://www.google.com/dmca.html

In any case, what you'll need to get back in (if you were banned) is a lot of patience. And of course, a cool head on your shoulders. It won't do you any good to get pissed at Google's staff...

One suggestion I think would also be helpful is to have someone at Google Answers check your site out and give you an assessment of anything you could do to your site to improve your chances of getting reincluded. http://answers.google.com/answers/

I wish there was an easier way for Google to let legitimate sites reincluded. Blogger does have a mechanism to remove the captcha (that's used to prevent spam - it's triggered by spam filters). And the Blogger staff has been very responsive to this kind of request... Why can't Google do the same? Don't they have the big $$$ and the brains to make this happen?

-j

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home