Banned from Google and back on in 2 days
I have had a roller coaster ride experience with Google. Spanning from utter reverence to complete disdain, to fear, concern, joy, revolution and many more experiences that all have left me with an impression of Google here or there.My most recent experience of Google was a two day festival of emotion and reactions.Many people wont have a clue what I am referring to here but I recently saw a serious drop in traffic on SA Rocks:
Those red arrows...never good. I freaked out. Emailed people, tried removing things I thought might be problematic. And then Mr Jason Bagley tweeted the answer in geniously casual fashion: "check out Google Webmaster tools - might be able to spot something happening in there."Yes, the answer was there. SA Rocks has a problem. I am not going go in to much detail other than to say that thousands of invisible links are injected in to the SA Rocks template occasionally. I didn't even remember this issue and consider it a problem. But it was. Google had booted me off their indexes. Not. Good.The drop in traffic is the result of having every page, every search term, every SEO effort that you have put in for over two years vanish off Google. Gone, kaput, over. Again, I freaked out. This is where the angst, anger, frustration and a mass of other emotions began to flow. I hated Google. I hated the fact they could almost literally grind my hard work to halt by simply removing me from their service. It's a shocker. And they are strict. If you haven't made use of them yet, I suggest you head over and get on top of Google's webmaster tools. They will prove to be invaluable should you one day be booted off Google.I received a message in my Webmaster Dashboard alerting me to the fact that I had been removed from Google. I then Googled SA Rocks, South Africa Rocks, Rocking, SA or anything that I knew would pop SA Rocks on to the top of the ranking somewhere on Google. Nada. Nothing. Niks nie. Kak myself.But it wasn't too bad.I was alerted to the problem by the helpful text-person talking to me on my dashboard. I figured it out, invisible links, google, spam, bam. Went to the origin of the links, manually removed them and then applied to be reevaluated by Google. This is an absolute must if you ever want to be visible on the known web again.Then I honestly thought that I would be waiting for weeks. But I didn't I waited for two days and was reinstated to the Google Indexes. Thank goodness. Can't tell you how glad I am that this is over.Be sure to check up on your website, Google yourself, your websites and your profiles.
