DISCLOSURE: THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS, WHICH MEANS WE MAY RECEIVE A COMMISSION IF YOU CLICK A LINK AND PURCHASE SOMETHING. PLEASE CHECK OUT OUR DISCLOSURE POLICY FOR MORE DETAILS.
UPDATES: Recent pages are now being indexed, so perhaps someone at Google is listening – YEA! Also there’s a site linking to this post with some bad information, stating:
“After 5 minutes of looking I find that has been running Digital Point Coop ads since 2006.”
Errors in grammar aside, this is a false statement. We removed DP ads in October of 2006 when we discovered they could be hazardous to our health. I posted a comment on the author’s blog to let him know his information was inaccurate, but he’s yet to post the moderated comment.
I spoke at length yesterday with an SEO firm regarding our indexing issue with Google. For those not in the know – no individual pages on GadgetMadness are being indexed after December 12th, 2006. That’s right, the very last individual page to show up in Google’s index is this one. Individual pages beyond that with our original reviews and content simply don’t show up in Google at all.
The SEO firm is chewing this over and is going to get back with us. Apparently if you’re site is banned/blacklisted from Google you will get a notice in Google’s Webmaster Tools, and there’s no notice like that in ours whatsoever. I recently submitted a reinclusion request but according to the SEO company it probably won’t help because there’s no notice in Webmaster Tools about the site being dropped.
The lesson to be learned here? We are now living in an age where Google controls a great deal of what “is” and “isn’t” seen on the web, and how we access it. In our case, at least the GadgetMadness index still shows up in Google. However other sites have seen themselves vanish completely from the index without any reason given, and Google is nearly impossible to contact to find out why when it happens.
I truly apologize for the soapbox, but this problem is literally killing the site and we’re not the only ones it’s ever happened to, and we probably won’t be the last either. Going back in time to a place when Google wasn’t quite so big, I’ll ask the same question today I asked back then: “Google, sweetie, how can we make it all better if you don’t tell us what’s wrong?”
Comments are closed.