Measuring the number of links coming into your website, it gives you authority on any number of subjects and keywords. So when your website suddenly gets downgraded within its index, it’s effectively taking your authority away. It’s coldly telling you that you’re not the expert that you previously were, that you’ve been toppled from the castle from which you had previously ruled.

As I wrote here previously, I noticed about a week ago that I had been harshly and inexplicably downgraded in Google’s index for several keywords, a move that effectively cut my traffic from the search engine by half. This, of course, upset me, because I had worked very diligently to write quality content –content that has been linked to by thousands of blogs and websites — only to have my authority whisked away in such a short span of time.

Over the next few days, I began exchanging emails with SEO expert and friend Stephen Ward. He determined that Google bots were able to still crawl my website and therefore theorized that I was experiencing something called “Google Dance,” which means that as Google updates its algorithm websites tend to get thrown through a loop. He advised me to sit still and eventually the dust would settle and my posts would rank well once again.

Well, Stephen emailed me today with confirmation that Google has completed a major algorithm change, and that I shouldn’t be surprised if this trend continues for a long time. For whatever reason, Google has likely thrown me into a hole that I will have to somehow slowly crawl out of.

So how harsh was this downgrading that I experienced? As I wrote to Stephen in an email:

For instance, let’s return to my name “Simon Owens.” There is no doubt in my mind that based off the thousands of links that bloggasm has gotten, many with the anchor text of my name, I am the most prominent Simon Owens on the internet, and of my different websites (my livejournal, an old livejournal account, and bloggasm), Bloggasm has seen by far the most links with that anchor text. Why then is it ranked third, when obviously anyone searching my name would most likely be looking for Bloggasm? Why is it ranked behind a livejournal account I haven’t updated regularly since 2005, one that probably hasn’t seen any fresh links in that amount of time? It’s absolutely silly.

Since Bloggasm was first created, I have had my posts linked to by over a dozen of Technorati’s 100 most popular blogs on the internet. I’ve made it onto the front page of both Digg and Reddit. I’ve been interviewed and featured in articles in The Washington Post, ABC News, and several other major news outlets. I’m currently ranked within the top 10,000 on Technorati.

And on top of all this, I produce a good bit of original content. I actually conduct original research and publish feature-length articles — all in my spare time.

But despite all this, despite the fact that I don’t engage in any questionable website practices (selling links, link exchanges, spamming other websites with links), Google has for some reason determined that many of my posts aren’t worthy of a decent ranking.

It’s absolutely maddening when you really think about it. All false modesty aside (and obviously I’m biased on this), Google’s new algorithm change has actually weakened its search results in regard to this website. There is absolutely no excuse for why Bloggasm should come up in third place, behind a livejournal that hasn’t been updated or linked to in years, when you Google my name.

So in an effort to spread whatever Google love this front page may still have, here are some links to original articles I wrote for this site — articles that gathered tons of links and should have plenty of authority but sadly don’t:

1. Youeditor: Anthology Builder and the self-selected table of contents

2. Tor Books to offer social networking, original short fiction and nonfiction online — this was one of the posts that were harshly downgraded, despite the fact that it was linked to on BoingBoing and dozens of other websites.

3. The rise of the genre ezine: Will it ever find a profitable model?

4. Is journalist burnout on the rise? — this article got harshly downgraded despite the fact that it was linked to by Romenesko and dozens of other websites.

5. Readership of major liberal blogs declined in 2007 while conservative blog readership increased — this post was harshly downgraded despite the fact that it was linked to by some of the most popular blogs on the internet, including Andrew Sullivan, Think Progress, Little Green Footballs, Crooks and Liars, Newsbustors, Salon.com. Are you getting the point yet how fucking stupid this algorithm shift has been?

6. The Dawkins Effect: How The God Delusion mainstreamed atheism — this one was harshly downgraded even though it was linked to by at least two A-list blogs and dozens of smaller ones.

7. Harriet Klausner: the publishing industry’s secret weapon?

8. The Sideways offensive: Will Merlot sales ever recover?

9. The Million Writers Award: raising the profile of online literary journals — this one doesn’t even come up first if you google the words “Bloggasm” and “million writers award” in the search field. Pathetic.

10. When “webscabs” unite: Celebrating International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

11. The Creative Commons Confound: Whether releasing your book for free will help boost your sales — this one, like all the others, was harshly downgraded despite the fact that it got linked to by dozens of sites and at least two A list blogs.

Well there you have it. Thanks a lot Google for rewarding my hours of hard work and thousands of links with the ranking I deserve.

As someone who has operated a website for years, I know first-hand how fickle Google can be. As I documented previously, Bloggasm was completely wiped off the web for several hours the other day because my account with my server had been suspended. They had been sending me emails to an address I never check telling me I was overusing my bandwidth and if I didn’t upgrade,they’d have to take down my site. Luckily, I was able to get hold of a sales representative fairly quickly and begrudgingly agreed to pay more in monthly fees to host my site.

My site went back online that same day, but I immediately noticed a huge drop in traffic, particularly traffic coming from Google. Well, today I decided to do some Google searches for some of my most popular articles, and as I expected, I found them to be harshly diminished within the Google index. To give you an idea of the severity — several of the websites that popped up first were blog posts that were linking to my blog post.

So what does this mean? It means that articles that I spent sometimes hours working on — articles that gathered dozens of links from other websites — barely rank at all on Google. Hell, even a search for my name doesn’t even put this website at the top. Because my website was down for less than 24 hours, I’m now looking at decreased traffic and decreased potential ad revenue.

It’s times like these that you wonder if the hours you put into a blog are really worth it. I can only hope that in the coming weeks those blog posts that collected so many links will slowly be re-indexed in such a way so that they actually get the page rank they deserve.

It has an advantage over Wikipedia, however, in that it won’t have to start from scratch. The site will no doubt receive a deluge of links on its launch date, and this will be a good chance for us all to be early adopters. I’m going to try my best to give it a month-long test run, though I have a feeling I’m going to resort to using Google from time to time.

It’s not that I’m against Google or anything, I think it’d just be cool to be one of the early influencers of what could potentially be a major search engine. And who knows, maybe it’ll stick.

So who’s with me?

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Related posts:
1. An area of Search Engine Optimization often overlooked: Google News
2. Google’s employees transported to work in their own buses
3. The politics of Wikipedia

New search engines that are emerging are currently using a system that involves a “human factor,” in that humans will go in and tweak the search results to cut down on those who are trying to manipulate the search engine system, otherwise known as “search engine optimization.” Apparently, this idea is so potent that even Google is looking into trying it out.

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Related posts: Why is the Litblog Co-op completely ignored by several major search engines?, When “webscabs” unite: Celebrating International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, Why Google News shouldn’t include blogs in its search results, Why is Technorati so unreliable?

Imagine my surprise, then, when I went to go research the Co-op for an article I was going to write, only to find out that they’ve for some reason been blacklisted from Google and other major search engines.

Anyone who has even a basic understanding of Page Rank and Web Rank would know that with over 1,000 incoming links, many of them with the anchor text of the words “Litblog Co-op,” Googling those words should easily bring you directly to the site. However, when you type “Litblog Co-op” into Google, not only is it not the first result, it doesn’t even show up on the first page.

Confused, I dug deeper into this to try and find out why the correct results weren’t showing up. First, I searched for “Litblog Co-op” on MSN and Yahoo, and as you can see, I got the correct results. Next I searched for it at AOL and Ask.com — both of which use Google software — only to find that they, too, weren’t giving up the correct results.

After this startling discovery, I dug even deeper, only to find out that Google isn’t even indexing the site at all. I unearthed this by searching for specific phrases within quotation marks to filter out all other websites. As you can see, the only thing indexed in Google is the LBC atom feed.

Given the above information, it’s my recommendation that the LBC move their website to a different URL that isn’t blacklisted from Google. If their true goal is to promote these books, then they’ll want the valuable search engine traffic that comes from the three search engines that combine together to make up over 90% of all internet searches. If I were the LBC, I would take this very seriously. Search engine traffic is very valuable.

UPDATE: It appears that the Litblog Co-Op is looking into the issue and they’re possibly going to move to WordPress.

ANOTHER UPDATE: As I initially suspected, there was a no-follow link in their source code which was deflecting Google bots. I emailed one of the Co-op bloggers and they’ve located the no-follow link and got rid of it.

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Related posts: The Writing Life as dictated by Stephen King: Summed up with obscure metaphor, The text-advertising wars, Dear Instapundit, An area of Search Engine Optimization often overlooked: Google News, Interview with POD-dy Mouth, Only days after the whole Facebook “face-lift” controversy, Livejournal introduces a similar feature

Obviously, there are plenty of incentives to get included in Google News, by doing so you open yourself up to more hits from search results. And no doubt many bloggers will label this as a victory for bloggers seeking to get noticed as “real” journalists.

But since I rely on Google News on a daily basis to help me find topics to blog about, I’m not as happy as some about Google’s decision to include blogs in their search results. Here’s why:

If I wanted to know what blogs are saying about a topic, I’d do a blog search

There are already several search engines that allow me to comb through blogs for specific topics. Google has its own blog search, and there’s Technorati, which even manages to rank blogs into terms of authority. By having them also indexed in Google News, it’s just creating a redundancy, just as if videos would show up in Google Audio searches simply because the video has “audio” contained in them. By separating blog searches from news searches, we’re able to hone in on what we want more quickly.

Blogs and news articles are still mostly two different kinds of media

This is the one that I’m sure will get a few people annoyed. Malcolm Gladwell has an excellent blog post called “The Derivative Myth” that talks about this very subject. For the most part, blogs are still mainly commentators on what the Mainstream Media is reporting. Are there examples of investigative reporting from bloggers? Yes, of course. But to date, I subscribe to and read over 200 blogs a week, most of which are some of the most powerful on the internet, and the vast majority of them don’t contact sources for interviews or do any research other than google searches. There may come a time when bloggers do begin to conduct extensive research, but until then I still view them as mainly filters for which news articles get the most attention.

Too much white noise.

Recent calculations say that there are anywhere from 30 million to 50 million blogs out there. If enough bloggers contact Google News to be included in their search results, they will easily outnumber non-blog news services by many millions. It will get to the point where Google News searches will be no different from Google Blog searches, and it will be next-to-impossible just to find articles on any subject that aren’t reported by blogs. This has already become a problem for me, since some search words I type into Google news already give me a page full of blog posts, making me comb through page after page looking for articles that don’t come from blogs.

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Perhaps, if need be, there could be a compromise. Let Google News put in a function where if a user wants, he or she can filter out all blog posts in their searches. This way, the bloggers can have their victory in being included in Google News, and people like me can sort through that day’s news more efficiently.

JOURNALISTS over the years have assumed they were writing their headlines and articles for two audiences — fickle readers and nitpicking editors. Today, there is a third important arbiter of their work: the software programs that scour the Web, analyzing and ranking online news articles on behalf of Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The search-engine “bots” that crawl the Web are increasingly influential, delivering 30 percent or more of the traffic on some newspaper, magazine or television news Web sites. And traffic means readers and advertisers, at a time when the mainstream media is desperately trying to make a living on the Web.

So news organizations large and small have begun experimenting with tweaking their Web sites for better search engine results. But software bots are not your ordinary readers: They are blazingly fast yet numbingly literal-minded. There are no algorithms for wit, irony, humor or stylish writing. The software is a logical, sequential, left-brain reader, while humans are often right brain.

via collision detection